Four lines

I sometimes wish this were a ship, going somewhere
a cabin free, free dip to fall in the moving deep,
all alone across a time dial that still ticks, here
like a grain of sand in a drunken sleep.

Some Babel Poetry

There sure was a reason why the gods confounded man at Babel. See below, what might likely happen if a sentence, phrase or poem as I tried below, is passed through these languages. English-French-German-English. Let's just assume that three bilingual people should meet and should have to converse. The Englishman speaks English to the Frenchman who repeats it in French to the German who in turn says back it in English.

This experiment started here

Source:
Twinkle Twinkle little star
How I wonder what you are
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky.

Result:
The sparkling sparkling hold less the first role, as I ask myself over, what you over the so high world than a diamond in the sky upward are.

Below are some random blog descriptions, and what Babel thinks of them:

ARACELI'S BLOG: A mummy and some other things. This blog once per week is brought up to date... it is, if he is not.

MAC'S BLOG: I. I am even my conscience. I am living me my conscience, breathing and consciously. * Now I stop understanding me * I am logical, and very systematically I am not a perfectionist. I am not special, but I am different. I endorse art car portrait control, and I remain a Wurzelschoessling for the free expression.

NILLA's BLOG: Place the patriotic Nigerier downward at the earth.

KIIBAATI'S BLOG: Proudly Naija with confidence liberally and evenly Creative. Thinking global, but actively humanly. And the assionémentglauben (that), from it it is impossible to fail...

WORDSBODY: I am of the Niger an author and an art journalist based in London. I write an art column in a newspaper of the Niger, and my work appears likewise in many other publications occasionally. This blog is a consequence from in former times on the culture and the arts. As the entrance hall on the scene of the art of Nigeria will be before, an author particularly of the Niger of the body of its ' word ' -. in the measure, as, we will likewise affect on a broader African writing exactly the same as the international literature. Briefly a saturation of the arts.

iGwatala's BLOG: By Nigeran, the large six of feet four, but fortunately made by the books more largely I did not read males. Thusly mentioned Milosz of the poles (no intended wordplay). First a linguist once a journalist and often poèt. A young strange man, who thinks it, is mostly just seen to him everything and written for the Exorzismus. Well, since, then he will not save the literature the world not also not me save could. But attempt I. This blog is a public intimate kind newspaper, an unloading, blog comme un livre dans progressent - from a vibrated soul. All reserved rights.

I sure as heck didn't say the above!

Mack tagged me.

Three things that scare me:
1. Change
2. Creativity
3. Adulations

Three people who make me laugh
1. Chris Rock/Sola Olorunyomi's Daughter
2. My niece of 13 (who by the way writes some poetry)
3. My dog

Three Things I love:
1.Water
2.Peace of mind
3. Wine

Three Things I hate
1. Heat
2.Mosquitos
3.The smell of Flit/Raid/any mosquito repellant

Three Things I don't understand
1. Change
2. Growing up/grown ups
3. Myself

Three things I’m doing right now
1. Typing
2. Thinking about home.
3. Drinking.

Three things I want to do before I die:
1. Publish a (collection of) plays (and probably short stories), and more poems.
2. Finish reading Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
3. Save the world

Three things I can do
1. Get into trouble
2. Get lost
3. Stare/Play Chess

Three things you should listen to
1. Music (Lots of it)
2. Yo mama
3. Sola Olorunyomi on the Bass Guitar

Three things you should never listen to
1. Me on the Bass guitar
2. My opinion on the poem of whomever I do not particularly like
3. Tade Ipadeola's assessment of anyone's poem.

Three things I’d like to learn:
1. Patience
2. To sometimes keep my mouth shut.
3. How to sometimes just be invisible/How to say NO.

Three beverages I drink regularly:
1. Five alive
2. Vino Tinto Sangria
3. Ponche. (Did he say beverages?)

Three TV shows/Books I watched/read as a kid:
1. Stories my mother told me (book)
2. Arofo awon Omode (I know you don't know it. Go search online)
3. Alawiye(book)/Ifa Olokun (TV serial)


I still insist there's something sinister about the internet.

BABEL IS CRAZY. But we know that already, right?

Here's my find this afternoon in some idleness. Keyed in the following text in English into Babel Fish asking for a French translation:

"What is worth doing at all is worth doing well"

I get the following translation back, which I suspect might be correct in French:

"Ce qui vaut la peine de faire du tout vaut la peine de faire bien".

Now, I translate that back into English, using the same software, I get the following:

"What is worth the sorrow to make whole is worth the sorrow to make well."

***

Curious, I tried for German.

English to German: Was wertIST, an allen zu tun,IST wert, gut zu tun

German back to English: "Which is to do at all is worth, to do well"

***
In all cases, the meanings had changed by the time it got back to the original language.

Last try. ENGLISH to FRENCH to GERMAN, then to ENGLISH

ENGLISH TO FRENCH ="Ce qui vaut la peine de faire du tout vaut la peine de faire bien".

FRENCH - GERMAN = Was das Leiden wert ist, vom Ganzen zu machen, ist das Leiden wert, gut zu machen

GERMAN - ENGLISH= "Which suffering is worth to make from the whole one to suffering is worth to make good"

Wits and Wisdom of the Computer!

Now, ASSIGNMENT. I hereby tag all of you who read this blog to make your own experiments, and make your findings known. Pick a short quote, and run it through languages, then let's see what you get in the end. Remember that childhood game we play in circles, when we pass a little phrase round a circle in whispers until it reaches the person that started it, most times in a mangled, humorous form? This looks like it. We can call it Stille Post E-nternational.

Thanks Somegirl, Chinese Whispers, was the English expression I was looking for.

Okay, Okay.

Let us start today with this song from Eminem. Let me confess, he's actually one of the songwriters I relate to much lately. This track plays on the computer as I write from an author's office this midnight:

Sometimes I feel I'm crazy...
why am I here, am I just wasting my time?
But then I see my baby, suddenly I'm not crazy,
It all makes sense when I look into her eyes.

Sometimes it feels like the world's on my shoulder
Everyone leaning on me
Sometimes it feels like the world's almost over
but then she comes back to me
...

Okay, so much about retiring from blogging. It wasn't meant to be, as you must have guessed, but sometimes you wonder if the world was going to end, and you try to speak, say something out before you go, instead of leaving the world to complain of your impromptu exit. You know; that... let me speak before they try to insinuate that the exiting was not prethought of...

Back to songs, I also remember this from the movie "Bringing down the House". Queen Lateefah had sung:

Life aint going nowhere
slow down
I'm just taking my time
until you show me some time
that you're better than the rest...

The advice here often becomes the hardest to adhere to. But it's true, right? Life's going nowhere.

So, so much for philosophy. Blogging will remain. Maybe it's the new reality. "Google is the new Godot". Flash drive is the new trinket. Everyone is wearing it now. We will remain here, it seems, and what we MUST do, is to keep on speaking to one another. I may not be able to transmit my thoughts through words however. I may not successfully transmit my amazements, fears and hopes. My knowledge fail me when I face stark reality. Like Milosz described, it is like a housefly's amazement on the waxed glass of a vehicle, how does it understand the concept of solid air? And how much innocence must remain in a man until he is genuinely flawed? Isn't innocence itself overrated? Useless questions really, but not useless, the acts of questioning.

Welcome me back? There's so much to learn from each other.

NB: If you would be in Ibadan in March, you could drop by at the Osundare at 6o Literary Fete at venues in Ibadan, Ikere, and Lagos. See ya there!

The blog stops here.

Or maybe not. Twice, I have tried to get out of the internet. Twice I have failed. The first was at Yahoo 360 just after my return from NYSC, when blogging began to seem a far less comforting alternative to tangible social consciousness, and day jobs. Now last week it hit me again - the devil, and I turned the blog off to only allow private viewership. The peace of mind I envisaged therefrom however did not last. And here I am again. Apologies to all while I still contemplate a final solution. Till then, here we are.

So, meanwhile, let me recommend the following (new?) blogs: Kiibaati, Nilla, and Mack. That is if you have read OWNB, and Noni Moss. Also BlogAfrica and NigerianBloggers where this blog will continue to be aggregated even if it ever get's taken off the public.

The world around me is changing.
I must too, again and again.
Hope the light at the end of the tunnel
is not that of a coming train!

"Our greatest fears is not that we are inadequate... but that we are powerful beyond measure..." Williamson

iGwatala!

Two poems, mine

MACEDONIA
Lagos again, December

Speak you must, muse, in taps, raps -
Drum, tat-a, rolls of a furious key.
The tongue to rile a fog of blabbing naps.

As with a lost wing, flap on white winds -
Serrated dots of letters, dice dials of thought
Move the night with mares of omen rinds.

Why do you forget yourself so? Soul-
Journer of a sea of words and flaming fate?
It is I who call. Grant the bearing role.

Speak you must, muse, in raps, taps -
Drum, tat-a, rolls on a furious key.
From this fringe of meagre dream of wraps

IF THESE WERE WRITTEN IN TIMES PAST

They would smell of rum, maybe wine
Of a pristine dance on brown keys that tapped,
Rasped in echoes across father's dusty lounge.

They would reek of innocence, shy lines
Of the toddler whose eyes lay only in the silence,
laden trivia of books, and old record sleeves.

They might show relics of a hopeful child lie
Within a bulwark of rage in the silence of night,
Quiet when adults slept with ears apart, dead to the world.

They would try to hide the author's disgust
for past bustles, home noise and day jobs,
Useless rants that mainly deter than fuel a budding muse.

But it wasn't written then, and so the past remains
Bilked in bits of old rum in even older flasks, and pains.

(c) All rights reserved. 2007.

My Books of 2006

The following are a few of the books I came across, and read, during the past year (mainly towards the end). I composed the first draft of this post in November, in response to Molara Wood's annual call to authors to send their favourite reads of the year. Her online list is published in Farafina Magazine. The print list is forthcoming - in some Nigerian dailies, I presume. (Apologies for earlier misposturing). Here, anyway, are a few of my engaging reads, with reasons.


NO SENSE OF LIMITS, by Araceli Aipoh

Why I like this book, I don't know. Maybe it's because I didn't expect much when I picked it up, yet I was pleasantly surprised when I finished with it - I'm finicky with cover designs - and I had not heard of the name much. "She's a foreigner who works at an Embassy in Lagos." My host had said. "You'll like her portrayal of Lagos. Take a look." I said OK and picked it up for the night. When I completed it the next day, it felt like watching an entertaining (and well made) Nollywood movie. I think I almost cried at one part even. Seriously. It must be towards the end when a relatively unknown grave-digging character found something familiar in a grave... (No spoilers here). Soon, I hope, the author would have the work at Amazon. I recommend it for reading. The story might not be so particularly Nigerian (as many reviewers have said.) You could change the names of people and places and still find it nice, equally as beautiful. The telling however is great.

ABOUT: I have said that it read at times like Soyinka's You Must Set Forth at Dawn and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code both books which I read only days before, where all/most the action takes place within the course of the persona's journey through flashbacks and gradual disclosures. In Soyinka's case, it was a flight back from Exile while in No Sense of Limits, it was the femme fatale's drive through Lagos on a course of revenge.


THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES by Eve Ensler

Having heard so much hype about this book, I finally got a copy, and read it in a night. I must say that I did not get much impressed to equal the hype raised by critics. I am not a feminist. I read the book for information, and pleasure. And I wasn't disappointed. It is a nice book, though it could be kinda wierd holding it in your hand with the title sticking out so boldly in the presence of your parents and their church guests. You would save yourself the trouble of explaining if you would just put a paper wrap around the cover. My best part of the narrations was the funny/sad narration of a woman whose husband slept around ostensibly because the wife would not shave her pubis. If you would not read the book, you could watch Sex and the City instead. You wouldn't miss so much...!

My friends joke about a riposte, in form of the Penis Diatrible, (and maybe later, The Genital Dialogues) but, mischief and humour apart, it's always nice to read literature that seeks to defy conventions, and to shock. Great work.


ABOUT: A series of narrations by women, about their vaginas, and its influences on their lives.


YOU MUST SET FORTH AT DAWN by Wole Soyinka

Also so much hyped, this lives up to some expectation as a record of history from the view/angle of one man who should know because he has been there. So what can I say on this that has not been said before? I guess it's that it's another result of an incurable restlessness of the author, slamming us with a work of prose (the third, I think) in the series of his memoirs with the size of the complete works of Shakespeare. It is however engaging enough not to be boring, except the bits about Nigerian history, for those foreigners more enchanted with the mystery of the man than perhaps his political motivations. Towards the end, however, I was stuck by his continuous use of one word, "chagrin", and not for want of more suitable synonyms. The professor also gets the "block" sometimes.


WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT: Because why not? This is an account from a man who has lived life to the full, over and over, and his telling is, characteristically, entertaining. You'll know why the Ori Olokun in Ife is a clone of a lost original now in the British Museum.

Oh Paulo! And some other funny thoughts...

Oh Paulo!

"There was not anything that was not made without him." Paul Adefarasin 24/12/2006.

Tuface's Grass2Grace

His recent album has some really nice tracks. (I like about three: 5,9 and 12. Finito) But somewhere between justifying my likeness for his style and blaming myself for buying it, I was struck by his use of "Nigger" in a line. He said "Don't wanna come across to you like just another Nigger" in track 5. My mind immediately raced back to his first album Face2Face in which he sang "Just because... I no finish school/ some people take me for a fool..." and I thought, "OK, Maybe this is why!" Let's look forward to his next: Crass2Craze? Just kidding.

PDP

My brother sent me a list of meanings for the above abbreviation. I couldn't help but agree with a lot of them. Look below:

Perpetually Destructive Pestilence… Primitively Dignified Pigs… Professors of Devilish Policies… Permanently Delivering Poverty… Preferring Disease for the People…Pharaoh + Deceit = President… Plainly Dishonest Pack… Penchant for Detrimental Practices…Playing Dangerous Pranks… Possibilities of Disasters Persist… People Demanding Psychiatrists… Pioneers of Decadent Politics. Poisonously Decimating Policies…


and many more...

Disclaimer: I'm not a politician, but only a direct recipient of many indiscretions of the ruling party. The above does not represent the opinions of Headfirst into the Meddle and Bloggers. Use them at your own risk, and you are free to form some more.

Merry Christmas

To Everyone

Here is wishing you a very merry Christmas and all the best joys of the season. May all your (good, sweet) dreams come true soon.

--
KT

Some Quote

"The secret of genius lies in the clear and impartial perception of the objective, the essential and the universal. By seeing so far, he doesn't see what is near. He is imprudent and queer; and while his vision is hitched to a star, he falls into a well"

- Arthur Schopenhauer
German Philosopher (1788-1860)

2006 Nobel Banquet Speech

By Orhan Pamuk. 2006 Winner of Nobel Prize in Literature.

Why do you write? This is the question I've been asked most often in my writing career. Most of the time they mean this: What is the point, why do you give your time to this strange and impossible activity? Why do you write... You have to give an excuse, an apology for writing... This is how I have felt every time I've heard this question. But every time I give a different answer... Sometimes I say: I do not know why I write, but it definitely makes me feel good. I hope you feel the same when you read me! Sometimes I say that I am angry, and that is why I write. Most of the time the urge is to be alone in a room, so that is why I write. In my childhood I wanted to be a painter. I painted every day. I still have that childish feeling of joy and happiness whenever I write. I write to pursue that old childish happiness and that is why for me literature and writing are inextricably linked with happiness, or the lack of it... unhappiness. In my childhood, I felt happy, painted a lot, and all the grown ups were constantly smiling at me. Everybody was gentle, polite and tender. I wrote all about this in my autobiographical book, Istanbul. After the publication of Istanbul, some people asked me this question: Aren't you a bit young to write your autobiography? I kept my silence. Literature is about happiness, I wanted to say, about preserving your childishness all your life, keeping the child in you alive... Now, some years later, I've received this great prize. This time the same people begin asking another question: Aren't you a bit young to get the Nobel Prize? Actually the question I've heard most often since the news of this prize reached me is: How does it feel to get the Nobel Prize? I say, oh! It feels good. All the grown ups are constantly smiling at me. Suddenly everybody is again gentle, polite and tender. In fact, I almost feel like a prince. I feel like a child. Then for a moment, I realize why sometimes I have felt so angry. This prize, which brought back to me the tender smiles of my childhood and the kindness of the strangers, should have been given to me not at this age (54) which some think is too young, but much much earlier, even earlier than my childhood, perhaps two weeks after I was born, so that I could have enjoyed the princely feeling of being a child all my life. In fact now... come to think of it... That is why I write and why I will continue to write.

Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 2006

Another Mail From My Inbox

From Mr.Lisa Jones.
Bank Of Scotland Ltd,
11-16 Cockspur Street,
London ,
SW1Y 5BL.

Hello Dear,

Best of the season! I was reading through your profile on the internet and found it interesting.Be so kind to contact me at your earliest convenient for a possible business deal involving money transfer of about £15 Million.I ampresently in London working as an investment consultant with the above bank at their London office. I am poised to work this deal out if we cando business.As at this moment, I am constrained to issue more details about this business until your response is received.As we have not met before, I will give you every details you need to know about me as weprogress with the business.I thank you for spearing moments of your very busy schedules to read my proposal.

Send your response to my email address. Thank you for your time and attention.

Warmest regards,
Mr.Lisa Jones.

MY COMMENTS: Do you Yahoo?

The Kwansaba

You can call this a sub-post. It is culled from the mail I received from Eugene Redmond, the Poet Laureate of East St. Louis.

"The kwansaba, a 49-word poetic form invented during the Writers Club’s 1995 workshop season (in East St. Louis), consists of seven lines of seven words each; each word must contain between one and seven letters. Exceptions to the seven-letter rule are proper nouns and some foreign terms. Previous issues of Drumvoices have featured kwansabas for Katherine Dunham (2004), Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez (2005), and Jayne Cortez (2006).

Following is an example ofa kwansaba from Drumvoices #13:

Neo Kwansaba in Barakan Verse(Mali Newman)
Poetree grown from stanzas tongues my ears
Don’t play Dough Ray Mi Vaso Latte
Unless Dada Doowop Dadaism is dead, unless
Trans (it) Blues in C, major or minor
Died by volumes twenty one times, don’t
Play scale up/scale down, while Baraka
Breaks off a piece of his mind.

My comments: You are free to choose your style. You don't have to write as complex as above.

Kwansaba submissions should be sent by Jan. 1, 2007, to Drumvoices Revue,English Department Box 1431, SIUE, Edwardsville, IL 62026-1431. Submissions should be in hard copies as well as on Microsoft Word disk.

For more information, send email to eredmon@siue.edu, fax 618 650-3509, or write EBRWC @ P.O. Box 6165, East St. Louis, IL 62202.Founded in 1986 and named after East St. Louis Poet Laureate Eugene B.Redmond, Writers Club trustees include Amiri Baraka, Angelou, Walter Mosley,Barbara Ann Teer, Troupe, Dr. Lena Weathers, and Avery Brooks. Trustees alsoserve on the editorial board of Drumvoices Revue. Deceased Trustees includeMargaret Walker Alexander (1915-1998), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), andRaymond R. Patterson (1929-2001).The Club is currently celebrating its 20th year of twice-monthly meetings(first/third Tuesday), 6:00-8:00 p.m., in the Library (Building B) of the East St. Louis Higher Education Center, 601 J. R. Thompson Drive. Meetings are held September through May. All writers, from beginners to professionals, are welcome.

You can also send your Kwansabas by email to eredmon@siue.edu. Deadline is January 1, 2007

White Christmas Dreams

Written just now, to wear off the boredom on my hands

I am dreaming of a white christmas
whether of dust or biting fog or snow.

I am dreaming of a white christmas
Just like the one I used to know

I am dreaming of a white christmas
whether of flour, grits or corn flour

Or elubo, with all nutri-flakes of white
and the long grins of Santa's borrowed beards.

* This year, no one in my compound will visit Father Christmas, having all finally grown. And I live in a very large compound.

The Many Sense of Ogunlesi's Post

Let us for this moment ignore the correctness or otherwise of my English in the subject, and look below with a little patience. It is an extract from Tolu Ogunlesi's post to Krazitivity on the denigratory remarks the new generation of Nigerian writers have suffered from the many mouths of the older poets. I have read posts after posts of young/er and new writers in response to the many challenges of the denigration they often suffer from the mouths of their elders, the most recent being from the eminent Professor of Literature, Ben Obumselu (of the Imo State University) who many have accused of not having even read any of the works he so easily disparages: He is quoted as saying of new Nigerian poems: “boring, totally uninspiring, empty and without a story”, blaming the emerging Nigerian poets for their inability to create popular poetry that will stand the test of time.

No doubt an ignorant generalisation, arising from a general unavailability of the new works for the critics to make available in the forms understandable to the likes of Prof. Obunselu.

Here's Tolu, in part*:

"Chiedu Ezeanah is sometimes said to be the "best poet of his generation". What is the likelihood of Obumselu "stumbling" upon a copy of Twilight Trilogy anywhere that goes by the name of bookshop. I have never seen The Oil Lamp or Madiba in any bookstore in Nigeria, other than the copies that I saw when Ogaga was in town for a reading at Jazzhole in October. I think that maybe we need a non-profit specialist bookstore (in Lagos, in the first instance) devoted to the work of Nigerian writers. Such that you are sure that if I go to [whatever name it is called] I will find every work ever published by Helon Habila (the pre-Caine non-fiction book for example), or Voices From the Fringe, or Nnorom's Letter To God & Other Poems, or Oguibe's A Gathering Fear, or Chika Unigwe's Tear Drops."

And here's mine though not much on the challenge as on the solutions to create accessibility for our much "invisible" works:

We need more than a bookshop. Call it a resource centre. What is ANA if it does not have a record of ALL books published by authors in Nigeria? Like an equivalent of the United States Library of Congress? What of an online resource? Something managed by custodians of art's growth (this falls back towards ANA or whomever will assume the responsibilities) that has first of all a list of ALL published works by Nigerian Authors (those living in and those living outside). I am not in doubt that Macarthur Foundation or equivalent grant making international bodies will be interested in funding such projects as this.

The sense in the above, among others, is to call attention to the absence of a place (on earth) where works of all writers in the country can be obtained. But we should be able to get the works of ALL writers, from Acbebe to Adichie, Okigbo to Ogunlesi, from Soyinka to Shehu without sweat... It may be the very first step in making New Literature available to all, including those who wish to speak authoritiatively on the aquality of the issues we engage.

On the other hand, I think it will also become an index of our creative/literary development/advancement.


* Tolu Ogunlesi is one of the new generation's prolific voices in poetry. His letter is used by permission.

** My first book "Headfirst into the Meddle" is not available on bookstands for reasons not far from the issues above, and is not just "forthcoming" as published in my latest profile on Sentinel Poetry, and I am myself interested in any such initiative as can help the above cause.

The Sentinel Monthly Challenge

Usually works like this. A monthly theme is suggested, and the form. (Last month's theme was "Movement", and the poem must be thirteen lines. This changes every month.) Now everybody writes in, then after the closing date of submissions, the poems are displayed in the listserve without the names of the authors (to avoid prejudice), and the moderator calls for votes of everyone to rate all the poems in the order in which they want them to win, leaving their own out, with points differing only in one integer. E.g Five poems entered. I vote for the four other poems leaving mine out, in this order: Poem 1, 5pts; Poem 2, 4pts, Poem 3, 3pts; Poem 4, 2pts etc. the points are then added and the winner disclosed. More information at Sentinel Poetry website. And at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sentinelpoetry

Lessons in Language

There is a reason why I am always curious about other people's languages and it is not (only) because I read Linguistics at the university, but because my curiosities have always been pleasantly rewarded. Would it not be interesting to one day discover which language was first spoken by man and how precisely it came to disperse with the rest of humanity? It's been the obsession of linguists since the field was invented. Forget the biblical tale of Babel. Even there, it did not say precisely which language it was.

Now take the following amazing similarities I discovered in Swahili and Yoruba, my own mother tongue, sometimes last year during my stay at the Eldoret campus of the Univerisity. Note, Swahili is an East African language while Yoruba is spoken in West Africa. Therefore, if scientific "theories" are to be believed, any similarities found in the two languages must only be explained as either a borrowing, or a movement from the East to the West. i.e. The Yoruba people, and indeed everyone in this side of the continent were once settled close to East Africa and had moved westwards over time. Of course, my pride won't allow me take this. I have numerous myths of Oduduwa decending with a chain in Ile Ife to support my insistence that, if anything, Swahili it was that developed over time from the people who had migrated Eastwards from here due to wars, discrimination etc. Anyway, the similarities are amazing, and there are many more i did not find. Look below.

Kiswahili/Yoruba

Lala (sleep)/Lala (dream)

Kufa (die)/Ku (die)

Nyama (meat)/ Nama (meat). What we call Suya, they call Nyama choma (roasted/smoked meat)Ni (is) /Ni (is). So, to say Seun is my friend would be Seun ni rafiki yangu, like Seun ni ore mi in Yoruba. Same structure.Pole (sorry) /Pele (sorry). The word pele in Yoruba is actually quite ambiguous, but it can be used to expressed apology, or care for someone who's just been hurt. But it doesn't mean the same as "I'm sorry". This is expressed as (E) ma binu.

Pole pole (gently or carefully) /Pele pele (gently or carefully). Perfect correlation.

Nini (what) /Kini (what)

Nani (who) /Tani (who). Linguists would find ways of explaining how N became T or the other way round, or K as above. But it won't remove the mystery.
Kwani (what is it)/ Kiwani (what now is it)

Jana (yesterday) / Ana (yesterday)

Kiboko (whip) / Koboko (whip). Koboko, in Yoruba, is actually borrowed though now, the source may be lost. But in Swahili, the meaning is Buffalo. That's where the whip is derived from.


I found these in a collection of over four hundred words of the Kiswahili language, and I am convinced that there are several others bound to amaze still. And such exist in other languages around the world, even those so farther apart than Swahili and Yoruba.

Some wonder!

MON C'est Quoi?

I think it was Aluwe, that famous comedian in Nigerian home video who quipped, on being asked what he thought of his award as the Member of the Order of Niger (MON, a high honour in Nigeria), rather wittingly, that what he got was only the "MON" without the accompanying "-EY". I thought and laughed about it again last week when a poem I (re-)wrote lately, borne out of some love/career distress was said to have won an online monthly "Challenge"1. A sort of competition.

Look at it from this side, poems are often agonising expressions of some present reality. They may be enjoyed, praised, adored by others, but they are oftentimes foremost a private self-bleeding and aggresive paring of the author's soul. This was why when I saw the notice, I was not much surprised/ecstastic. I myself, in private sanity, had heaped praises on the author for such craft. (I do that sometimes). But instantly the headline, "K...T... wins October Challenge", brought back those deja vu reveries of some sweet vanity in the midst of pain.

It reads in part:

Oh what to give to move the bridge, even Christ spoke alike.
A human bond which though we feel we cannot reach beyond.
Once false, once real. It stretches through a burning filial bond,
just like a mile of rage sewn thin astride a path of spikes.

Poetry never saved anybody! And this is what Omo-Alagbede said:

"Wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a pig because you like pork".

I think he was right.

The work will be published in December at Sentinel Poetry Online Magazine, and I will now get, as gift, a book, "Of Man", by Thomas Hobbes, and now, I can disagree that MON always come without an "-ey"!?

Drunken Poets/Drunken Posts II

DRUNKEN LINES

Even these lines dance with my drunken trot.
In stupor,
In loud consonance with agreeable
belligerent voice right beside me,
Within known Chrises, I trot in staggering gait.

Morals leave me now

Windy dive into drunken throes moves us all,
delinquents, across frail life planks.


Written in Stupor: March 2005