Howl the Problem of the 21st Century

First Du Bois got it all wrong, waxed all poetic in error, and then complacently proclaimed:
"The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line."

And then others came along and said Du Bois was even more prescient than he himself could have known. The problem, said the new philosophers, of not only the 20th century but also the 21st and presumably the 22nd century will still be the problem of the color-line.

They too, like their intellectual ancestor, were wrong. 

The central problem of all times has always been the problem of the greed-line. The desire of the few to grab the all at the expense of the many in defiance of our shared humanity.  The insatiable appetites of the diseased minority to organize their sense of Self around stealing from the Others...  

In other ages before our own, the potential of this problem to toss our wills to sing common human songs has always been there, staring like the ghost from haunted dreamscapes. But we survived because no one made a religion/ideology/morality/God of human greed. The banter of cautionary tales always stood, sometimes precariously but always determinedly against hordes of greedy bastards supposedly acting out the will of God...

Until. Well, until we came up with the wonderful idea that for "everyone" to be happy, some have to become slaves, others cleaned out, and the rest transformed into succulent zombies begging the varied appetites of those who tossed Titans off Olympus and assumed God-shapes/Greed-shapes.

The same pseudo-heroes who arrogantly declared the end of history because somehow their banker friends suddenly found themselves in "unassailable" positions of power and their politician acolytes could order all kinds of incessant freedom wars to kill and kill and kill again in the name of some "democracies" only they in their exalted follies could understand.

Those who created the conflagrations of Babylon and asked for the keys to Persia and then installed Blackface to do PR for their increased appetite for blood their bloodlust I say their deathwish upon all of us including themselves except that they did not could not know just how stupid they were...

But we woke up one day and remembered the ancient wisdom of our ancestors that say that you do not burn communal barns in order to satiate single hungers...

You do not burn our collective homestead just because you want to live in a mansion in Hollywood in Beverly Hills on the Moon at wherever else your sick mindscape has drawn as your manifest destiny of now

 And our children marched on to New York to Paris London to  Rome to Toronto to Hamilton
And asked questions that Mayor Bloomberg Sarkozy Cameron Berlusconi Harper said could not should not be asked

Questions about why it is that some bleed the all and get bailed-rewarded so that more would bleed all over again
Questions about why we want to live in dignity but those who claim they are appointed by God on our behalves insist that our fate should be only in the gutters looking into the ravines

And while they asked these questions the blood of our kinsfolk in Tripoli in Benghazi in Sirte in Mogadishu in Abidjan in Baghdad in Kabul cried out:

One of these days the poor will have nothing left to eat but the rich but the thieving rich but the evil rich
And oh, the Lord God of the harvest shall endow the cannibalistic poor with one hell of a sickle
For the harvest of the few fed fat on our fees and fears the sumptuous dinner of the rich that must die

And as Du Bois himself would have howled if he were not caught up in small details,
The problem of the 21st century is the problem of the greed-line
And we will have some exciting skirmishes yet.
Howl howl the darkening night howl howl howl the coming bloodbath!!

Of Wooden Indians, Forgiving Colonisers, and Why We Don't a Give an "F"

Somewhere tucked in the maelstrom of BBC's perpetually self-righteous propaganda wars against the Zimbabwean and by extension African people is a video item this week about a "Zimbabwean man [who] forgives men who had beaten him up."

Sad, sad story. Like always. And we savage natives, guilty by association, are supposed to weep for the sins of our cousins and relatives and regret our gargantuan capacity for ingratitude. Ah, that painful word that reminds of all that is wrong with us: ingratitude...

Why not? Just imagine the scenario in which a perfectly innocent man is accosted by a group of strange and strangerly vandals, beaten in a most savage way, and then ejected from a land that he owns by the glorious dictats of an ancien regime of his knowledgeable peer-colonisers. And think of the even more touching dimension: That man can speak, and in his elevated poetry of the soul kind of dialect, he recalls how at the height of all the atrocities perpetrated against him, the only thoughts that came to his mind were drawn from the morally superior words of Jesus who had admonished us to forgive those who ill-use us, etc etc.

What a saint. A holy saint. A perfectly holy saint whose matyrdom, when it is finally confirmed, would provide sanctified material for the most holy of shrines for sad generations yet unborn. Posterity...hmm.

And history is on his side, too. Concerning Zimbabwe, everything was done in the proper manner and in the proper spirit.

After all, had Cecil Rhodes not shown enough good faith by signing an agreement with Lobengula? Had the great white inheritors-of-Zimbabwe-by-the-will-of-god not given enough trinkets and guns and alcohol to the local "rulers" to make the stealing of Zimbabwe by a handful of refugees from Europe the most convenient of transitions in all of modern history?

...and on, and on, and on. But my rebellious spirit could just not soar so holily on Christ's elevated words, or the creative use to which this modern-day buccaneer cum soldier of the cross was putting them. Rather, my mind strayed to that grey zone of unmentionable factoids. There, I picked scattered remnants of a voice from not so long ago:

I was the red man
I was proud , I was strong
You were the white man
And you stole away my home....


You were the white man
And you drove me in the ground...


...I am a wooden Indian
Standing silent in the rain
Swear BY my grandfather's father
We're GONNA rise again...

Na na na....nah, nah, nah, nah, nah...the glorious words of Jesus and how he spoke about forgiving enemies might mean a lot to self-righteous twerps intent on scoring cheap propaganda points on BBC. But, with due apologies to those who have sensitive spirits, etc., those words don't mean shit to men and women whose lands and inheritance were stolen in broad daylight and given to bandits whose only god was/is greed. And no matter how much pretense is set up around it via the smooth-talk of modern noise-multipliers such as the BBC, the attitude of the disinherited would not change until the right thing is done.

Contrary to what many people with short memories would like to believe, Ben Freeth and his father-in-law can do a lot better than join up with some hypocritical concoctors of imperial nostalgia over at BBC. And even if they do, their rantings about kingdoms-gone-so-soon won't, with due apologies again to those with sensitive spirits, mean shit.

Like a famous wise man once said, "there is an old saying in Tennessee, I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you...Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
There is another, similar saying in Zimbabwe. Or Kenya. Or South Africa. Maybe in Namibia...or Libya. It's a swear by a grandfather's father's name that roughly translates as: we simply don't give a fuck about holy charlatans!!

Atukwei Okai: A Tender Homage to Noisy Poetry

Part Two

Was it the drum that called you or it was you who called the drum? One attempts to answer that and finds the inevitable gap that clouds all searches for antecedents of genius. Maybe in this case as well as that other well known one, there were no calls. Not from either side. No calls. No voices. No supernatural portents.

But find each other you did. The drum and you. You and the drum. The ancestrallogic of the ancestraldrum in the high tide of Romanticism in Blackface.

For you came to us at a time when all poetry, for us neo-Euro-bourgeoisie of the Anglophone West  African species, had to go through the clearing houses of Chaucer-Shakespeare-Marlowe-Pope-Wordsworth-Keats-Browning-Hardy ad infinitum to weave comedic strains of inane parrot-vogues that not even we ourselves would give a second hearing to.

And while we jested our offbeat iambic pentameters and imbecilic hexameters in the marketplace of others looking for sympathetic ears to buy our songs-dead-at-birth, it was you the iconoclast from Ga Mashie who burst on our stage with the "shocking" reminder that our ancestors did not talk in the esoteric accent of foreign coinages to rouse the Asante bush to the full stature of its erotic cheer. No, you said, even in the midnight of high betrayal, when our sons and daughters were sardined off to unnameable places to serve unnameable gods of unnameable morals, even those sons and daughters lost in alien soils trying to come to terms with life without home moorings, even those sons and daughters did not forget the primal ancestral birthcordial watu wazuri drums...

The wail of the guitar might be fine for Andalusian soils soaked with Lorcaian blood, but over here in Africa, we start with the drums.

We start with the drums in order to give voice to authentic Afro-discourse in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity...we start with the drums we start with drums we start with the drums.

For drums make noise and in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity, one needs to make noise in order to let it be known that we are just taking our time to make sure that it is you who is standing on our testicles that it is you who is squeezing our existential testicles that it is you who is trying to bracket our life-brockos...

Those are words you spoke and then you started with the drums you started with the noise of the drums even when it was clear the special branch our knowledgeable dons thought your visions were coming from a country with which our masters in the West were not on ayeekoo terms...

But did you care?

You returned you returned from the doldrums you returned with conundrums you returned with soles burnt upon coals you returned
You returned manuring our memories into a fertile remembrance of things recent and past
You returned and succeeded in re-entering the realm of the Old Odomankoma Okyerema against all the 666 barricades they set up against you all the 999 fake smiles before the stones they flung at you...

You started with the drums and swore your oath against all those who throw stones at us. We emaciated besieged ravaged uncertain returnees heard your first wail as though it were cool water to the parched palate of the droughted desert:

My brothers
                  My people
                                  My brothers
I am sought,
                  I am sought because
When you want to starve
                                  the ocean
You paralyze
                  its source
                                  the river

And who were you? Okai, who were you in the incarnation that called us back to the life of the noisy living drums?

You were the fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
You are the fontomfrom.
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!

Fontomfrom! The noise of the drums! Fontomfrom! The sense of nonsense! Fontomfrom! The sword of Nat Turner! Fontomfrom! The wireless phone of our ancestors! Fontomfrom! The mobile networks of our forests! Fontomfrom!

You began with the drums and the drums began with Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!!

Atukwei Okai: A Tender Homage to Noisy Poetry

Atukwei Okai

Part One

The cry of the fontomfrom wakes me from a studied slumber as I steady myself to pay homage  to our own version of what Walt Whitman and Allen  Ginsberg  could well have been if only they had worked a bit harder.

Fontomfrom. I throway salute. Fontomfrom. Fontomfrom.

Atukwei Okai is certainly not meat for milk teeth. Even though meat will certainly destroy milk teeth easily. I will take my time because the man who specializes on killing people for a living, executioner style,  may not take kindly to being flayed without appropriate preambles.

Okai's rumbunctious swagger alone would compel rumblings in the tell-tale heart. His verbose braggadocio would never spare the silent witness. And when his fontomfrom begins to wail begins to wag begins to call arms to war, one knows that it is time to re-member the most colourful Ghanaian and African poet of the 20th century.

So I will re-member him tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after. But I will take my time. After all, when we stage our traditional epics, we take our time. When we play out our Ozidi sagas, we don't rush out things  to shatter the miracles embedded in the tortoise crawl in the snail walk. We take our time we take our days we prate we stay our speed in slow paced imitation of the royal laze because we know when a chief stops a procession to do his thing, it is not for mere mortals to start asking infantile questions about schedules/timelines/deadlines. So I will take my time with this one.

This is just the beginning. Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
Somebody's newspaper salesboy. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's  rapper before hip-hop came along. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's love-lorn Rosimaya cuckold. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's bula-matari on ayekoo terms with too many gifts so many gifts. Fontomfrom!
Somebody's pseudo-Soyinka as good as the Nobel Laureate himself, Fontomfrom!

Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!


Part Two

Was it the drum that called you or it was you who called the drum? One attempts to answer that and finds the inevitable gap that clouds all searches for antecedents of genius. Maybe in this case as well as that other well known one, there were no calls. Not from either side. No calls. No voices. No supernatural portents.

But find each other you did. The drum and you. You and the drum. The ancestrallogic of the ancestraldrum in the high tide of Romanticism in Blackface.

For you came to us at a time when all poetry, for us neo-Euro-bourgeoisie of the Anglophone West  African species, had to go through the clearing houses of Chaucer-Shakespeare-Marlowe-Pope-Wordsworth-Keats-Browning-Hardy ad infinitum to weave comedic strains of inane parrot-vogues that not even we ourselves would give a second listening to.

And while we jested our offbeat iambic pentameters and imbecilic hexameters in the marketplace of others looking for sympathetic ears to buy our songs-dead-at-birth, it was you the iconoclast from Ga Mashie who  burst on our stage with the shocking reminder that our ancestors did not talk in the esoteric accent of foreign coinages to rouse the Asante bush to the full stature of its erotic cheer. No, you said, even in the midnight of high betrayal, when our sons and daughters were sardined off to unnameable places to serve unnameable gods of unnameable morals, even those sons and daughters lost in alien soils trying to come to terms with life without home moorings, even those sons and daughters did not forget the primal ancestral birthcordial watu wazuri drums...

The wail of the guitar might be fine for Andalusian soils soaked with Lorcaian blood, but over here in Africa, we start with the drums.

We start with the drums in order to give voice to authentic Afro-discourse in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity...we start with the drums we start with drums we start with the drums.

For drums make noise and in this world that we live in it where the quantum physics of existential inequality blows up the dorkordiki bowl of human sanity, one needs to make noise in order to let it be known that we are just taking our time to make sure that it is you who is standing on our testicles that it is you who is squeezing our existential testicles that it is you who is trying to bracket our life-brockos...

Those are words you spoke and then you started with the drums you started with the noise of the drums even when it was clear the special branch our knowledgeable dons thought your visions were coming from a country with which our masters in the West were not on ayeekoo terms...

But did you care?

You returned you returned from the doldrums you returned with conundrums you returned with soles burnt upon coals you returned
You returned manuring your memories into a fertile remembrance of things recent and past
You returned and succeeded in re-entering the realm of the Old Odomankoma Okyerema against all the 666 barricades they set up against you all the 999 fake smiles before the stones they flung at you...

You started with the drums and swore your oath against all those who throw stones at us. We emaciated besieged ravaged uncertain returnees heard your first wail as though it were cool water to the parched palate of the droughted desert:

My brothers
                  My people
                                  My brothers
I am sought,
                  I am sought because
When you want to starve
                                  the ocean
You paralyze
                  its source
                                  the river

And who were you? Okai, who were you in the incarnation that called us back to the life of the noisy living drums?

You were the fontomfrom!
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!
You are the fontomfrom.
Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!

Fontomfrom! The noise of the drums! Fontomfrom! The sense of nonsense! Fontomfrom! The sword of Nat Turner! Fontomfrom! The wireless phone of our ancestors! Fontomfrom! The mobile networks of our forests! Fontomfrom!

You began with the drums and the drums began with Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom! Fontomfrom!!


                                        

Merari's Merry Spirit Merges With the Stars

Merari Alomele

And of Merari Alomele, they say we must not say much. Not rouse the truculence of  the Fates by questioning their sense of timing and their choice of target.

So we will cultivate some silence here. But we cannot pretend to suddenly unknow a kinsman because of the fear of powerful Ones who have robbed us in broad daylight.

After all, Merari was the poet-cantor of our village who sang many laughters into our pained nights and taught us that a man may laugh at any fate that befalls him and by laughing transcend his fate.

Merari was the palaverian who delayed our foolish outbursts long enough to transform them into self-mockeries and in-bursts that enriched our often colorless lives.

Merari was the daredevil who woke up early in the morning with a gong in his hands and used words as bullets in his flute-mouth, piping away at kings and queens who shat into our village streams and thought they could get away with it because we had forgotten the fundamentals of talk-back. And he made us share in the collective joy of laughing at the caricatured fools.

Merari was a lot other things to us. We must know because he was one of us, was born among us and grew among us. We lived with him and saw him mount the stage under the village tree times without number to do the dance of our several selves.

For a man like that, and here we must dare the gods themselves and commit hubris if needs be, for a man like that, why must a time like this be imposed as the period of exit into a world whose accountability to us the living still  lies unresolved?

Perhaps heaven has lost all sense of humour, and to placate the gaping needs of Divinities for laughter, somebody went and recommended our village treasure our Sikaman laugh-yarn king.

Our loss, then, becomes a monumental gain for those beyond. And while that is little consolation, we will remember the man whose brief passage on the stage of life expanded our spirits so much and taught us to fall in love with ourselves again and again. 

Maybe we made a mistake in the process by falling in love with him too; people like Merari are the tantalizing gifts of the gods who must go back to the Givers sooner than we are willing to let them go.

He now belongs where he first came from. He belongs to the Ancestors.  Merari now belongs to the Ages. I say Merari's spirit has now properly married the Stars.

And suddenly, the world robbed of him seems to be a place for midgets. But at least we can look up to where he's gone  while we take pride in the living words he left behind.

Big Brother Merari, I am finally going to do the search for the source of your name although I am sorry to say, comrade, I won't be able to report my findings to you over at the New Times Corporation.

Meanwhile, blewuuuuuuuuuu. Efoga blewuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!

Rudimental Ruminations Against Rumours of Ruination

I sang a sonorous sorrow song for snivelling Solo.  And then breathed the lilt of life into his cancer-ed bones...

Shall I then not drag your private fear into the public gaze?
Shall I then not lift veils off your  fears of the dying of the day?
Shall I not break through the cordons of conventional proprieties
And cry your familiar pain into the complacent noise of the vulgar market place?

Trainee, I got your heart-beat soul-thirst spirit-zeal letter today
And in it I  also read your multiple doubts in streaks of multiple red signals
I read of the dread of myriad moons casting dreary shadows on your day-dreams
I read of the perpetual feel of the underdog lid on top of your  reluctant head

I read/felt it all because it is what we all know in the insistent ardour of this kill-dreams space. What we all must wake up to on Monday Morning and go to sleep with on Sunday Sundown. The booming blasts of the muezzins of impossible-lore. The cacophonous melange of die-quick prophesies from  prophets of doom who  have given up on life and embraced death-wish as their only salvation from challenges that the human spirit must rise to must loft on must transcend finally...

Familiar strains Trainee familiar strains of the debilitating masterpieces of darkrooms of fear/doubt/death
Familiar strains oh Trainee familiar strains because I too have heard them before I too hear them everyday I too will hear them tomorrow
Familiar strains Trainee familiar strains because they seek to kill the primal songs daemonic songs destiny songs that we must sing
Familiar songs Trainee familar songs because they are ubiquitous roadblocks that insist we carry the burdens of our yes-we-cans into the eerie silences of sinister cemeteries...

But Trainee oh my Trainee of the Nights that rock the hope-boat
It is not true it is not true what they say about underdogs whose villained voices must stray away from the mellifluent rhymes of greatness
It is not true it is not true what they say about of all of us being lost generations whose voices scatter untracked like lost planets lost from the Milky Way
It is not true Trainee it is not true in spite of all that a thousand naysayers in their hallowed follies pronounce

So go out there and sing and dance and fly and touch your skies
You go out there and dream of days of drudgery and nights of passion and victories that must follow
Go out and shout over and over I know in my heart I can do it I know in my heart I can do it...
Benevolences of our universe will echo you we know in our hearts you can do it...you can do it...do it...
And then you will do it you will do it you will surely against all the odds do it do it do it


I wrote this for you, Trainee, because I too believe in my heart that you can do it/you will do it.

Tribal Time-warps and Morbid Melancholies

From all indications, my newly discovered discipline and desire to keep ramping up and broadcasting--I have a specifically agricultural image in mind here-- the miscellanea from from my besieged pabulum ran into serious trouble these past seven days or so.

I have serious excuses to mollify the most implacable of critics who would want to call me out on a charge unkept. But, he-he-he! I won't share those excuses. At least, not for a while.

Something else has been bothering me and has taken up most of my time in the past week. The complacent base of my easy/happy assumptions about my neighbours ran into a devastatingly negative decalage last week when  one of them walked up to me and told me, point-blank: "Look, I don't like you. I don't like people like you."  Just like that. Right in the heart of Accra, Ghana c/o God's Own Green Earth.

"If you were this player, what would you do?" I had read this question somewhere in a now defunct newspaper, The Soccer Scene, in 1986 just on the verge of the Mexican-hosted World Cup when a player called Jose Toure, one of the key performers for the Blue Cocks of France, sustained an injury and was forced off a team that went into the tournament as number one favorite and eventually ended up with a fourth place finish that disappointed a lot of neutrals.

Now, you would ask: What has that got to do with anything? Well, I am coming right along to that: I fancied myself as a kind of top player for the post-ethnic human sensibility team, you know, a kind of Jose Toure with enough acrobatic gestures to qualify me as a diplomatic Maradona, or something equally cool enough along those lines. And I thought I was coasting right along towards my own fiesta universalia until my neighbour you-know-whom walked along, punctured my idealistic balloons, and sent me to the back-of-melancholic-beyond to revisit morbid mutterings I thought I/we had left a long time ago.

For my neighbour was none but the same old face of the trib(e)/al/ist/ic champion who thinks-- I am more tempted to believe you can't think these things, you only need a thick, savage dot-head to repeat them every time your stupidiasis starts acting up, but let's stick to the t-word, for lack of a better--that I deserve the soul-burning excoriations of the old savage sensibilities that marks the man on the other side of the fence as the enemy, the one bad "thing" without whom the world would be perfect.  I was, for her, the lingering symbol of that for whom she and her companeros dunder-heados needed to constantly write/rewrite/revise/act out their own Mein Kampfs as a prelude to the staging of their final solutions, too.

Now, having spoken in round-aboutish manner so far, let me come to the main point of this evening's ramble.

My neighbour's Stonehenge-shaped message, in simple terms, was that I belong to the "wrong" tribe.
In this age.
In this time.
In this place.
In our Africa of the post-traumatic Renaissance.

Oh yes, I think of myself as an African. And I guess part of that has to do with the fact that I have no quarrel with where the Transcendental Force wisely decided for me to set up base and contribute to this contrapuntal melody we call life. But my African-ness grows in the awareness of other people's stories. Stories that are as legitimate as mine; stories whose essential colour in tandem creates the rainbow visual that is our collective heritage. We all, Africans, Asians, Americans, Europeans; we all bring colour to that table. And to come to the place of appreciating those stories, I left the wisdom of the tribal prejudice behind a long time ago. Or I thought I did.

But maybe that kind of worldview is too lofty/too unrealistic. My neigbhour brought that much home to me last week with her all-knowing, prehistoric poise. Her florrid fatuous flatulence about why it is that "your people are trying to take over the country from my people when it has always been that the country belongs to my people and that it was my people who built the empires and ruled the others and created all the history and produce/d all the brainy ones and are known across the world and are chosen by god/God  to continue the good works...etc etc etc"

And she added in good prophetic measure: "The war is coming; it is inevitable. The battle lines are drawn, and something would have to give...Some people must be sacrificed to enable these multicultural environment to be sanitized with the univocal truncheon of the savage ideal...We will clean out your people, or drive them into the sea, or out  to XXX across the border where they belong..." I could almost see the cockroach accusation not far behind, already solidly formed on the mental horizons of this thick-skulled throw-back to an age of human evolution that we may only refer to in qualified whispers.

I laughed.

Not because I found it funny. What's there to find funny about foolish ideologies that demarcate "chosen people" versus "gentiles" and encourage genocidal fantasies about those "unlucky" to be so chosen? What's there to find funny about nut-case philosophies that invent, calcify, and then sanctify the myopic tribal essence as the be-all and end-all of all existential striving? What's there to find funny about ideas that have produced Apatheid's hell-holes and the German Holocuast in Namibia and Hitler's concentration camps and Rwanda and DR Congo and Liberia and Sudan and so on?

But I laughed. Laughed because on the spur of the moment, I could do no more than that. And also because I found out a long time ago that one could not persuade a sick fanatic based on logical arguments.

So I laughed.  And then I thought of Robert Frost, the old New Englander criss-crossing his snowfields debating his birch trees invoking his missed opportunities/roads not taken...Robert Frost... recalling the stone-age savage philosophy that glorifies fences and stereotypical masks the prevent humans from recognizing fellow humans as complemental pieces that enable a more rounded vision of the puzzle of life.

But after laughing, I went back to my room and then fell into a deep depression of the spirit. A morbid melancholic wrestlemania with all the warps and manufactured distortions that hold back the quintessential melody of being...That's where I have been all this while.

Maybe I have shared my good excuse about why this blog took the long leave, after all. But hey, I am back till a better excuse pushes me back into hibernation.