Fairuz in the morning
“I am from Palestine, born in Jordan of course”
Of course
Um Kulthum by night
“I am from Palestine, born in Jordan” – And you? – “Palestine”
Are you all from Palestine?
“Remember you are in Jordan” – I know
Fairuz with Nescafe
to start off the day
and Um Kulthum to bring on the night
it will be a long one –
—
Amman, January 2020
….was the day Israel began to bomb the hell out of Lebanon in earnest, in July 2006.
Huz was on a ‘mission’, and Amu and I tagged along as I was very eager to see what all the fuss was about as far as Beirut was concerned, ‘Paris of the East’ and all that jazz. Not to mention the taouk sandwiches that Huz raved about from the last couple of times he’d been there.
Needless to say, I fell in love with the place, and most of all, the people. The Lebanese are just gorgeous if you ask me. Beautifully skinned, beautifully dressed (skimpy for women for a country in the Middle East, I thought) and I loved the way they spoke Arabic…and French. Hearing my own name being pronounced by an Arabic speaker was pure pleasure, and considering I wear my heart on my sleeve, I merrily proceeded to…
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Yesterday, an old university friend, Saqib, asked me if I would join him and another friend for a trip to Senegal. In reply I narrated the travails of my 2007 visit there while making sure that none of the enthusiasm is dampened.
Incidentally, Senegal was put by Eqbal Ahmed under the same category as Cameroon, i.e., pragmatic-authoritarian (in his research paper that I covered in my last post). Interesting too, that the regime covered by Ahmed is that of Léopold Sédar Senghor who was a poet! So I read him and a few more Senegalese poets from a collection of African poems and came up with the following poem:
I ask of the dream song unfettered
promise as it rained night rained night as
as you dared to sing your warrior
song wounded worded as wound what
then of the sword forgot to sheathe
forgot the hearth of song? I ask
of the dream song unfettered night.
Here is what I messaged (verbatim):
To say that getting a visa to Senegal on a Pakistani passport is difficult is an understatement. I tried to get one in Togo in 2007. The officer at the consulate said he could stamp a visa right there, but since I was from Pakistan, it would have to go through a security check. After some time, I got the clearance, and then I used that clearance number to apply for the visa in Gambia. I got the visa. When I reached Dakar, I was not allowed entry on that visa saying it was not valid. They kept my passport and allowed me to leave the airport only because I was accompanied by two goras and after speaking with someone from the ministry. Next morning, after receiving a letter from the ministry, they gave me back my passport. When I was waiting at the airport, a guy from Bangladesh told me nobody comes to Senegal on a Pakistani passport (they either use Canadian/Australian/American etc. passports to come to Senegal). I figured either because of drugs or illegal crossing over by sea. That said, I found Dakar to be quite electric. The captivating music is a giveaway to something stirring. It has been the shadiest African city I have been to. And hence closest in comparison to Karachi. We were mugged the last night we were there, but my colleague caught the guy and took him to the police station; a lady was in charge; she prayed her isha while we waited in the room. Couldn’t catch the conversation as it was all in French… so I wouldn’t be able to come, but you guys will definitely find it very very interesting.
Saqib then asked me why wasn’t the above a blog post. So I posted this as a sequel to my last one emphasizing the continuity on West African and Eqbal Ahmed’s pragmatic-authoritarian themes. Of course, this post is memory from way back in 2007 unlike the Yaoundé one which snapshots fresh impressions from last week. Saqib is an author/filmmaker. His debut book, The Warehouse was published last year.
PS: I realize that it was in 2008 and not 2007. Instead of changing the year in the text and title, I will let it be, a reminder of how memory stands in relation to fact.
A short 5 day work trip to Yaoundé, Cameroon. This was my first central African state so I was curious as to what is common and what sets it apart from the 9 others I have visited since 2002 starting with Ghana, my most frequented African state.
– attendant in bakery: you are from China?
– bureaucrat in his office, after I get his last name right on first attempt: I am surprised you can pronounce my name; most people get it wrong. Me: if the name is in your local language, I will get it right.
Not speaking French was a handicap also a source of amusement for the women working in the bakery.
what is common: the quintessential African green the booming laugh the roadside stall mud old cars 70s architecture at ease with unlit spaces
what sets it apart: too bureaucratic policewomen at breakfast
I wrote my last post while in Yaoundé, and just before leaving the hotel room wrote this:
need of the forest burn
of the
ashen past will wilnot
the bread
of fury and tread of summer
these are
kind, various, available as
pastime
—
To get some background, there have been two presidents since independence in 1962. The current one is in power since 1982. This bit of information alone might go some way in explaining the high bureaucratization and security. The late Eqbal Ahmed in his 1980 paper, “Post colonial systems of power” (which I visualized here), categorized Cameroon then as pragmatic-authoritarian. This is how he defines pragmatic-authoritarian:
This highly personalized system of power enjoys a certain legitimacy and the support of significant sections of the population by virtue of the historical nationalist credentials of the leader.
Two noteworthy characteristics: these deeply pro-Western regimes tend to prefer strong political, economic and cultural ties with the ex-colonial metropolis rather than the United States. The strength of the armed forces remains circumscribed and, in comparison with civilians, military officers are assigned lower status in the official hierarchy.
i) flecks of the improbable, seen
in the nonsense
light of expectation ii) tripping
solemn, light,
as if crusted day is slave to the
roving eye
iii) so many statuettes of hope,
so little time
iv) we shall agree to meet half
way and then let
time absolve us from ever having to
remember v) the
having of the needless eye needled
into extravagance
vi) spools of nervous laughter asking
more from less
vii, viii, ix) the cathedraled temple,
spectacled toyness,
dry embrace of the relicced other.
An unverified lock, at
Peace with the key of dawn, at sea, at
Tentive
To
War as it unravels
as it un
Derstands nothing, at
Sea;
the argument rolls out
rolls t
Oo another seemingly benign tap
tap
tap.
Aug 25, 2016
Fresh out of a family trip to Malaysia, after taking in the expansive green, I was struck by the unapologetic African green on my hour long drive from Monrovia’s airport to the city proper. But proper it wasn’t in so many ways. The lush green of humanity that underlies all earth has its peculiar infringement here: the stark signs of an unasked for ‘development’; the fancy NGO cars contrasted with mostly older local ones; the few good expat-catering restaurants with security guards and the others unguarded, catering to locals; the expensive everything in a poor poor city.
In the sense of following two different trajectories of neoliberal development, Liberia is similar to Malaysia, only on the opposite ends of well-being; the one being a model for the other. While Malaysian greenery is being tamed to showcase exotic development, the rawness of African green has yet to be tamed; always a reminder that something more powerful lurks below the sheen that is currently being desperately aimed for.
Undone by what I admire, the in
Most anchor, the
Brass measure of all that is bold,
Is crass, is class,
The feed of foul and its brethren of
Impure, the brew
And vole that burrows each hold on
Touch and bruise.
Sep 6, 2016
Left Monrovia three days ago and came back home yesterday. Since the first impression I wrote above, I spoke with the people I worked with, getting their take on the history of Liberia and their take alone (deliberately avoiding reading up online), and this is what I got.
In the 1820s, freed American slaves (Americo-Liberians) started colonizing a number of African states including Liberia and Sierra Leone under the organizing umbrella of a religious organization, the American colonization society. By 1847, the Americo-Liberians, who had pretty much taken over the country, freed themselves of the yoke of the controlling church. This is what is referred to as Liberian Independence. More than a hundred years of being under the Americo-Liberians, the 1970s saw two favorable rulers in the 1960s and 70s in terms of having an inclusive stance towards the indigenous Liberians, especially William Tolbert who ruled from 1971 till he was executed by the ‘accidental’ indigenous military coup-leader, William Doe, in 1980. During the ten years of Doe’s rule, the Americo-Liberians tried this way and that to remove him after which the horrible civil war began in 1989, and Doe was removed by execution in 1990. Charles Taylor entered the fray during this period. In 2003, war finally ended and after a series of interim governments, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf became president in 2006 and still rules.
That poet, he don’t do justice; does
Artful thought, renaissance
Crumble on a peach souffle, does heart;
don’t do justice; does wire
frame necessity capturing mouthful of
soul, prancing about the
hoary precipices of Saturn’s myth; don’t
do justice; peachy pie – chalk;
These are some wordspills from the last few days in Monrovia, Liberia. More detail, perhaps even more clarity, to follow.
I
So you have the sense of a
long now, the perhaps of a fire, a
Truce, axiomatic
Burn, the cut of a thousand
the but of another
sense of another
calm of
Tooth, axe,
postulate of norm
pestilence harm of your unknowns
II
the pin of an inconsistent
raw
ness - the
pine of ferment its disdain
for
all that isindolent
isincohate
III
The sense of being a toy or a
hound as a new world spills - dregs of
myinkpot
Before leaving for Accra, I had searched for Ghanaian poets online. When work was done, and as I was about to leave Accra, a friend took me to a couple of bookstores where I found a few books by local poets. And after coming back home, I searched online for some more. Here is a small sample of Ghana’s own voices, in verse.
I discovered Aquah Laluah (1904 – 1950) online after coming back home.
The Serving Girl
The calabash wherein she served my food Was polished and smooth as sandalwood. Fish, white as the foam of the sea, Peppered and golden-fried for me. She brought me palm wine that carelessly slips From the sleeping palm tree’s honeyed lips. But who can guess, or even surmise The countless things she served with her eyes?
Here is one by a contemporary poet, Kofi Anyidoho, from one of his books, “A harvest of our dreams”, that I found in Accra.
Newspeddler
Last night newspeddler told us how at last they picked the venom from our voice into stainless tubes well corked with seals of state and we will glide through life with all sorrows transformed into beatific visions of excessive joy so help us Dog!
And here are two from another contemporary poet, Tawia Tsekumah. His poems are almost Kabir-like in their directness. The first one is from his book that I got in Accra, “A crown for the baboon and other poems”.
Freedom
All life is but a battle Composed of captors and captives Mothers who hold their promising sons captive And fathers who hold their favourite daughters captive. Employers who hold their most hardworking staff captive And Parsons who hold their most devout captive. Husbands who hold their wives captive, And wives who hold their husbands captive. Freedom is not something you ask for - just take it. And fight with all your strength to protect it. Better to be free and hungry, Than to be well fed all your life in a cage.
And this one I picked up online:
The World Mirrors Like A Calm River
My good friend, I can't keep sugar-coating this anymore: You are the world, And the world is you, If you deceive the world, You deceive yourself, Your world is you, And you are your world. The whole world mirrors like a calm river.
I end with the last couple of poems I wrote before leaving Accra.
May 27
The history of words, of private Worlds standing in communion With the worry of dawn & the Flight of joy, the semblance of Meter & the line of hate, the Past as prejudice & a little Late; the history of verb As it acts on pawns of being Known; the history of you and What is not you given as the Word splits infinity.
The Obroni's burden
is a heap of cheap dyes;
wool cast in the lead of
black wounds; overcast sky
and underrated wish; the
burden is a
sin; an acknowledgement
of a woman waning
a son wanting
a rite repeating
in vain.
(The first two posts on my recent Accra visit are here and here.)
Kwame Nkrumah was the nationalist leader who led Ghana to independence in 1957 and went on to serve as prime minister and president until he was ousted in a military coup in 1966. That was fifty years ago. I tried to bring him up in a few conversations, and the one that sticks out is one in which the great leader – and Nkrumah is the Ghanaian archetype – is extolled over ordinary people, for what do people want except to “eat and sleep!” (quoted by a Ghanaian colleague who also proclaimed, “one great man is worth a thousand ordinary people.”)
I couldn’t disagree more.
I tried to bring in Eduardo Galeano‘s words to counter this elitist search for a saviour, but to no avail. Here is Galeano on the topic:
“You and I are educated and we know the world. We are in many ways what they call the leaders. And leaders must serve their people. No matter how tough our lives are, we are not victims. Those who are suffering are the robbed, poor, uneducated people. They have to decide whether and when to take up arms and go: they, not we. If and when they decide to fight, we have to obey and lead them. Whether they will fight or not is not up to us to decide.”
May 23
To say again the all; the singe Of song; to cry again the wary Wail and the army's ail; the Bemoaned are the joyous, but They will not carve out an Evolutionary niche in the Political economy of a tired Literature and burnt poetry.
(This is the second of a series of posts on my visit to Accra, Ghana, in May 2016. The first one, introduced the sense of the small small.)
Edward Said‘s Orientalism is one of those books I have been slow reading over the years, esp. on trips where I get very little time to browse the net. The gist of Orientalism is the humiliating Othering of the conquered that provided the primary justification for colonial rule. Failure to take that into account in mainstream discourse today plays out as continued internalization of the white man’s burden by both the oppressor and the oppressed, albeit in politically correct flavors.
May 19
I will run to the carrion of the small justice, to The fight that lulls the bird and stuns the sky; I will Burn the carrion of a smaller fire, a river That behaves only in periodic humiliations; we burn thus.
May 21
The structure of fear as it embeds itself; its Embers as they crown an uncertain glory that is Affect, distance, porous; the shred of an uneven Discourse.
My work in Accra involves collection of prices from markets. I visited the local Makola market in Accra – I was told the the largest in Ghana – with the price collection team.
Click on the Wikipedia link on Makola above, and you will find another Orientalist gem. A short introduction, but it is felt necessary to mention Anthony Bourdain’s visit to the market thus: “during the episode, Tony walked through the market, where he sampled local wares and enjoyed a condensed milk-toffee drink made with local herbs.”
The sum of all prices is one; The price as an asymptote Of value; the value of all Being is one; that of sweat And the hum of the market, The flailing economy of an Unreason; that which is not one.
Eventually little remains of the local market that is not tied to the larger, more efficient, global market. And there’s the rub.
The weep is an ancient want
Cry; an insoluble
To want to cry; the deep;
The fallible ineffable
Articulated by an effable
Other; the dark; the
Solder in its burn to
Weld and weld the red.
Gathering just-a-bit-o moss 