Kehinde Adeola Ayeni

Just Say The Word, and My Servant Will Be Healed

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Sat, 04 Apr 2015 04:23:00 +0000

. . . Jesus said to him, "I will come and heal him." But the centurion said, "Lord, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. "For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, 'Go!' and he goes, and to another, 'Come!' and he comes, and to my slave, 'Do this!' and he does it.”. . . And Jesus said to the centurion, “You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.” And at that very hour [his] servant was healed.—Matt 8:7-9; 13

I have always known as far back as I can remember as a child that when we keep quiet about injustice or abuse, someone dies a death, but when we are able to open our mouth and say NO, someone’s life is spared. I was in primary 4 when one of my classmates farted loudly in class and in the manner of 10 years old, everyone laughed excitedly, and following this, they began to call the boy who farted, Fart. He was embarrassed and each time he was called Fart, I could see him wishing for the ground to open up and swallow him. I couldn’t take it and one afternoon about a week after the incident, another boy called him Fart and I lit into him as I yelled “will you stop it! Everyone farts, you fart, your mummy farts, your daddy farts and even Gowon (the military head of the government at the time) farts, so let him be and stop calling him that, that is not his name.” The whole class including the teacher, I remember his name, Mr. Oyesola went quiet, and no one spoke for about five minutes. Mr. Oyesola stared at me and I steadily held his gaze, he nodded approvingly at me. Slowly, the class returned to what we were doing, but more important, no one called him Fart ever again.

I have always had a huge issue with unfairness in whichever way it presents its face and my blood would boil for a long time, as I am not able to put it out of my mind no matter how much I tried. And I have been a victim of what is not fair and just many times as well.

And there is a lot that is not fair in the world we live in which has led to the birth of the adage, “Life is not fair.” It is true that life is not fair, just like the fingers in our hands are not equal, but those are in the purview of destiny of birth as to social class, race, geographical place of birth, body shape and etc. and those, most of us can live with, but what tears our souls asunder are the oppressions and the prejudices that we visit upon one another every day, as in rejecting, discriminating, abusing, killing others because they are different from us or have a different way of living their lives or because of their gender, sexual orientation or their belief systems.

None of these are new, each human being from the beginning of time has always been lazy about doing the hard work of expanding his or her view of the world, and would do everything in his or her power to have the whole world comply with what he or she believes or is comfortable with. This is called Egocentricity, when a person believes that he or she is the only one that matters in a whole world of 7.125 billion of people and each of that 7.125 billion people should live their lives to make him or her comfortable by not doing anything that will be upsetting to him or her.

A lot of people that I know, good people, are upset at the thought that some people’s sexual orientation are different than theirs and would want such different people to disappear from the world, that way, and when the said different people are hurt or killed because they are different, they tell themselves, ‘they had it coming to them by their choices,’ instead of seeing such an act as a gashing wound in the world that we all live in.

A lot of kind and well meaning people say to themselves when yet another black boy is killed by the police, ‘he was a thug,’ and when people take to the streets to protest the killing would say ‘these people are ruining their case by these acts of vandalism,’ instead of seeing it as something that de-humanizes them and makes them supporters of genocide.

Women all over the world are expected to be in the degraded position of second class citizens and the woman who dares to step out of that place where she had been put is punished with the names, bitch when she is young and witch when she is older, other names are whore, ugly, fat.

My daughter recently told me that in schools in the US, black girls are in detention and suspended more than even black boys, and this is because people can tolerate a vocal white girl and a boisterous black boy but a black girl is expected to be submissive and quiet, and when a black girl is articulate and assertive especially in defense of herself, she had violated a sacred rule that says a black woman is supposed to contain all the dumping of negativity on her without complaining, and if she is not made to be quiet now, she would become an angry black woman like her mother and aunts in the work force.

For months, I have wanted to blog about this train of thought but I couldn’t really find the words until help arrived in the form of a story in Paulo Coelho’s book Aleph. I will not go into the details of the story, but in summary, the author on his personal quest to find out what could be blocking his joy in his present life was able to go back in time and to a life that he lived during the period of Inquisition and witch burning. Nine women, all under the age of sixteen were accused of being witches, being able to see into the future, and of having had intercourse with the devil. Their actual crime was that a farmer who liked to have sex with girls had tried to have sex with some of them and they had refused him and so he accused them of these hideous crimes. The crimes of the others were that they were very beautiful women, or that they were from rich and noble families.

They were tortured until they confessed to things that they didn’t do to prevent their bodies from being torn apart as they were tied to the torture ‘bed’ designed for just that, to tear a body apart. Paulo Coelho in this past life operated the torture bed. One of the women was in love with Paulo in that life time, he was the love of her life and though she was a noble woman and he a peasant, and as such their union was forbidden, she had been thinking of ways to be able to run away with him. He was a member of the Church and he loved this woman as well, and so in order to prevent the more sadistic soldiers from operating the torture bed, and to spare her unnecessary pain, he opted to be the one to extract her confession from her, and she confessed to the love that she had for him. That was her crime and her sin before the Church.

Paulo Coelho in Aleph continues:

[the Inquisitor said] “Gentlemen, I await confirmation of the verdict in writing, unless anyone here has something to say in defense of the accused. If so, we will reconsider the accusation.”

They all turned to look at me, some hoping I will say nothing, others that I will save her, for, as she herself said, I know her.

Why did she have to say those words here? Why did she bring up feelings that had been so difficult to overcome when I decided to serve God and leave the world behind? Why didn’t she allow me to defend her when I could have saved her life? If I speak out in her favor now, tomorrow the whole town will say that I saved her only because she said she had always loved me. My reputation and my career would be ruined forever.

“If just one voice is raised in her defense, I am prepared to demonstrate the leniency of the Holy Mother Church.” The Inquisitor said.

I am not the only one here who knows her family. Some owe them favors, others money; others still are motivated by envy. No one will say a word, only those who owe them nothing.

“Shall I declare the proceedings closed?” The Inquisitor, despite being more learned and more devout than I, seem to be asking me for my help. After all, she did tell everyone here that she loved me.

“Only speak a word, and my servant will be healed.” The centurion said to Jesus. Just one word and my servant will be saved.

My lips do not open.

The Inquisitor does not show it, but I know that he despises me. He turns to the rest of the group. “The church, represented here by myself, her humble defender, awaits confirmation of the death penalty.”

The men gather in a corner, and I can hear the devil shouting ever louder in my ears, trying to confuse me as he had earlier that day. However, I left no irreversible marks on the bodies of the four other girls. I have seen some brothers pull the lever as far as it will go, so that the prisoners die with all their organs destroyed, blood gushing from their mouths, their bodies a whole thirty centimeters longer.

The men returned with a piece of paper signed by all. The verdict is the same as it was for the other four girls: death by burning.

The Inquisitor thanks everyone and leaves without addressing another word to me. The men who administer justice and law leave, too, some already discussing the latest piece of local gossip, others with their heads bowed. I go over to the fire, pick up one of the red-hot coals, and place it under my habit against my skin. I smell scorched flesh, my hands burn and my body contracts in pain, but I do not move.

“Lord,” I say, when the pain recedes, “may these marks remain forever on my body, so that I may never forget who I was today.” pp188-190.

Some might say, but this is not the era of inquisition and witch burning, but isn’t it? Have we really stopped burning people who are different than us at the stakes?

In the past year, Nigeria along with some other African countries arrived at writing laws that criminalize two men or two women who love one another. And it saddens me because growing up in Nigeria; it was a common sight to see two men who are bosom friends holding hands in public, but now showing such affection will land you in prison.

Only say the word and my servant will be healed. This is the power that we all have; each one of us. At the age of ten, I said the word and a boy was spared the agony of having his beautiful name well thought out by his parents to celebrate the joy of his birth change to fart.

My boyfriend when I was 19 years old predicted that I would divorce when I get married because I was intolerant of abuse and mistreatment.

My roommate in college in exasperation called me a feminist, to her it wasn’t a compliment but I felt very proud.

We are all responsible, even for things that happened in history before we were born and not necessarily because we had lived in the past and participated in the evolving history of this world like Paulo Coelho, but because we are all nursed with the milk of the history of our different societies, and we identify with them and unconsciously perpetuate them in the manner in which things are transmitted down generations. Henrik Ibsen in Peer Gynt (1828-1906) said,

“Everything I have written is most minutely connected with what I have lived through, if not personally experienced; every new work has had for me the object of serving as a process of spiritual liberation and catharsis; for every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. That was why I once inscribed in a copy of one of my books the following dedicatory lines: To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul, To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”

And so we all have the power to say NO for that is the WORD that could mean life or death for someone. Just say the WORD and a life is spared.

Our silences, our non-involvement and our sitting on the fence condone Inequality, Maltreatment, Oppression, Injustices and Prejudices of different kinds, they are not neutrality but they are resounding Yes.

We need to say the WORD when our gay colleague is being ridiculed or marginalized. We must say the WORD, when the transgender in our college is being picked on. We should say the WORD when that child of color is being put down and we should say the WORD when women are paid less than men for doing the same work. We must all teach our children to say the WORD when a classmate is being bullied in their school or on the playground.

Just say the word and my servant will be healed. And the centurion servant was healed.

Paulo Coelho: Aleph
Henrik Ibsen; Peer Gynt

The Thought of Being a Creator . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 18:23:00 +0000

This is a story that was recently told to my 82 year old mother by relatives who are older than her, as they were convening to bury my grandmother’s first cousin who recently passed.

It is about my maternal great, great, great grandmother who contributed 1/32 of my genes, and 1/64 of my children genes.

Here is the story:

Once upon a time, that time being someplace in the mid-1800s, in the town Ado-Ekiti in Ekiti State, Nigerian.

This was a time of simplicity and innocence, that if for example you were a trader who sold bags of potato at one dollar per bag, and you had 20 bags to sell, you would display your ware in front of your house, like by your mailbox, return to your house to take care of other businesses like sweeping, washing, cooking or what have you. You would leave a dollar by the potatoes so that anyone who wanted to buy from you would know that it’s a dollar a bag, they would pick a bag and leave a dollar behind. At the end of the day, you would go there and collect your $20.00 or less and the remaining bags of potatoes. This practice was all but gone by the time I was a little girl but there was a vestige of it that I remember in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, and that is, you could still leave those bags of potatoes out there but you wouldn’t leave any money. If someone wanted to buy from you, on arriving there would yell for you with, “I will like to buy a bag of potatoes,” and you would rush out from whatever you were doing, wiping your hands on your apron to attend to them. No one would steal those bags of potatoes, even though they were unattended.

Back to the story of this ancestor, she was the daughter of a very wealthy man and married to the heir to the throne of Ado-Ekiti. They were very happy together and loved one another deeply. They had a lot going for them, they were wealthy and in time the heir became the king and she the queen. But there was one cloud over them, they were childless. They waited many years but no child was born to them. The woman whom I will call Queen did what childless women of the time did; she found a wife for her husband so there would be children born into the family. The wife had many children, and still, Queen didn’t have any. She found a second wife for her husband and the second wife had many children while she remained childless.

The king and the queen were very unhappy, he wanted to give her children and she wanted to assert her identity as a mother, so they sought help from many traditional healers. The best in the land advised them to return home and continue to enjoy the love that they had for one another as well their wealth and claim to the land as the rulers, but that they would never have children together. They both bucked at this and insisted that there had to be a way.

The only way, the traditional healer then told them was that the Queen had to give up all her wealth and her right to the throne as queen, leave Ado-Ekiti and start to walk west, there were no automobiles at the time and everyone walked or rode horses/donkeys everywhere. She would arrive at a river and in the river would be a man bathing, that man is her husband and the man that would give her children.

Queen, desperate to become a mother agreed. She and the king returned home and bade each other goodbye; she gave up all of her wealth and embarked on this trekking westward. In due time, she arrived at a river and indeed there was a man bathing there. She hid in the brushes and waited. He finished bathing, got out of the river, into his clothes and set off towards his home. She followed him at a distance. She arrived at a fork in the road, and didn’t know which way he went. She first went one way, it led deep into the forest; she retraced her steps and followed the other fork in the road and arrived at a village.

She walked around the village and saw the man disappear into his family estate. He was the lesser king of two villages that made up Oye-Ekiti and were connected together by some history.

She waited on the outside of the compound that housed the palace of this lesser king and spent the night there. In the morning, when the household awoke, the women of the house saw her there and greeted her as they started on their way to the river to fetch water for the day with their clay pots on their heads. She joined them and fetched water with them. They returned together, they prepared breakfast and offered her food and she ate. This went on for many days and the women of the house, the wives of this lesser king eventually told their husband about this strange woman. The lesser king invited her in and asked her what she needed. She told him that he was to be her husband and the man to give her children.

They got married and she gave birth to only one child, a daughter.

She never returned to her first husband the king of Ado-Ekiti.

The one daughter in turn gave birth to 4 daughters. These were my great-grandmother and her sisters, who were my grandmother’s aunts.

My great grandmother Adesoro died in 1958, four years before I was born.

Her sister Fagbola, known to us as Mama Coca-Cola (she lived close to the Coca-Cola manufacturing company in Ibadan) died in my late teens.

Another sister, we knew peripherally, and her name was Alhaja (she converted to Islam), and the fourth one, my older sister Ronke told me a story about her, and I am sure I must have met her. The story is that she sustained a hip fracture at some point and was bed-ridden because doctors told her they couldn’t help her. On a trip to Oye-Ekiti from Ibadan (with our grandmother Adelubi), Ronke remembered that she was bedridden because of this. But the following year, on another trip to Oye-Ekiti, when they arrived, she was busy pounding yam in a mortar with a pestle.

Adesoro, my great-grandmother gave birth to lots of children, by two brothers. The older brother died after she had had four children for him and then the younger brother inherited her and they had many children together, I think they were about eight or nine children in all, and my grandmother Adelubi was the second oldest.

Adelubi in turn had 6 living children and my mother, Adebimpe is the oldest.

Adebimpe had 6 children and my twin and I are the 3rd and 4th.

This woman who earned the right to be called Queen, she was married to two kings, one big and one lesser, but her queenly dignity lie more in the fact that she fought to give birth to her own children, sacrificing the deep love of her first husband, and great personal wealth, and she is the reason I am here today in this form.

Which makes me wonder, how many things had to be right, the vagaries of love, how many fights, anxieties, jealousies, rivalries, fears of not being attractive enough, rejections endured, hearts broken and etc. that your ancestors had to brave in different formulae and equations before you are able to arrive here on earth, and like Rainer Maria Rilke said in the Letters to a Young Poet: “The thought of being a creator, of procreating, of making” is nothing without its continuous great confirmation and realization in the world, nothing without the thousand fold concordance from things and animals –and enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the begetting and the bearing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.”

The Queen gave me 1/32 of my genetic makeup, and so this is the story of 1/32 of what made me who I am today, what about the each and unique stories of the other 31?

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available at your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Nigeria, A Wasteland!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Wed, 07 May 2014 18:36:00 +0000

The truth about Nigerian government is finally revealed to the whole world but more important I hope to Nigerians. Nigerian government has never done anything for her citizens but harasses, abuse, assault, kill them and pillage the treasury.

The defense continues to take the lion share of the budget but domestic terrorism has been given free reign and endorsement by the military and the police, from armed robbers constantly attacking and killing people in their beds and homes, and on the roads, to now out of control killings and abduction of people en masse. In Nigeria, you are allowed to kill in the name of whichever god you chose, and it is acceptable.

Nigerians have always prided themselves on their adaptability, ‘Suffering and Smiling’ is one of our saying, but are these things to adapt to? We need to replace that phrase with some serious expletives like WTF--yeah What the fuck!!!!!

Every Nigerian has always known the above, but we have individually condoned it by using one psychological defense or the other to hide these truths from ourselves, I understand, because these things can be too overwhelming to take in at once.

In the past, I have told stories of our experiences in Nigeria to people in the books I wrote, foreigners had thought it to be fiction, while some Nigerians, knowing it to be the truth had been angry with me for exposing the truth, they had accused me of being shameless in the way that I talked about my country, and that I was washing our dirty linen in public. Well our stinking linen(s) are out there now for the whole world to see!

We are about the most religious people in the world but all the devils of hell are now in the country.

An average citizen is so traumatized and feels so totally helpless that everyone runs to church and mosque (every other building is now a church or a mosque) to pray, and most of us have become religious fanatics. But sadly, religion used in that manner simply hypnotizes a person and makes him or her less able to act effectively in his or her own behalf, it acts as a drug and numbs a person.

I respect the religious belief that someone has chosen for themselves because it is an expression of their soul, but maybe we need to pray less and act more.

There are some things that are simply not acceptable and that one should not adapt to at all.

What we have in Nigeria as government, to bring it home to us, it is like having a mother and a father who are constantly beating up their children, not feeding them, not giving them medical care, raping them and as soon as they have new babies sell the older ones into slavery. We need to stop running away from this truth. We need to raise the bar of our expectations of the people in our government.

It is not just our right as citizens to demand accountability of our government, it is our individual responsibility and obligation, and when we fail to do so, we have failed ourselves and our country and we are as culpable as the people in our government.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mud-cracked houses
If there were water….

The Wasteland. T.S. Eliot 1922

Plight of Women in Nigeria

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:13:00 +0000

Plight of Women in Nigeria and our indifferent government is the theme of this book. Nigerian women are incredibly strong, courageous and hardworking, but this hasn't helped us with our despotic government. Maybe women should secede.

In Yoruba mythology, women were once fed up with the cruel treatment at the hands of their men and king, then Obatala, and they seceded. And so they went to heaven. Life on earth grounded to a halt, the rains stopped, there were no one to farm, and there was starvation in the world. Obatala had to appeal to Olodumare to entreat the women to return so that humanity can continue.

In Greek mythology, when Persephone was abducted by Hades, her mother Demeter cursed the world and there was barrenness and famine. Zeus had to step in and appeal to Hades to return Persephone to her mother.

Seriously, Nigerian men, this is not just women's problems, you need to stand up and by your stance make it clear that you are not a part of the abduction of these girls, because this act taint all Nigerian men in my opinion, where are you guys when the women were marching in Abuja yesterday?

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available at your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Quotes From Long Walk to Freedom

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 17:12:00 +0000

I read Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela about 12 years ago, and I compiled this list of quotations from the book. From time to time, in my own moments of needing courage, comfort and reassurance, I will return to them and read them again. I would like to share them with you.

There is little favorable to be said about poverty, but it was often an incubator of true friendship……………..Yet, poverty often brings out the true generosity in others.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

I learned that to humiliate another person is to make him suffer an unnecessarily cruel fate. Even as a boy, I defeated my opponents without dishonoring them.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

I also learned that to dishonor or neglect one’s ancestors would bring ill-fortune and failure in life. —Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

The answer, as far as the ANC [African National Congress] was concerned, was that we could not remain indifferent even when we were shut out of the process. We were excluded, but not unaffected: the defeat of the National Party [Pro Apartheid] would be in our interest and that of all Africans.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. People spoke without interruption and the meetings lasted for many hours. The foundation of self-government was that all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Only mass education, he used to say, would free my people, arguing that an educated man could not be oppressed because he could think for himself. He told me over and over again that becoming a successful attorney and thereby a model of achievement for my people was the most worthwhile path I could follow.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

I had unconsciously succumbed to the ethnic divisions fostered by the white government and I did not know how to speak with my own kith and kin. Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs. I again realized that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people with different tongues.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

I have always believed that to be a freedom fighter one must suppress many of the personal feelings that make one feel like a separate individual rather than part of a mass movement. One is fighting for the liberation of millions of people, not the glory of one individual.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

In discussing the ANC’s [African National Congress] policy of nonviolence, he emphasized that there was a difference between nonviolence and pacifism. Pacifists refused to defend themselves even when violently attacked, but that was not necessarily the case with those who espoused nonviolence. Sometimes men and nations, even when nonviolent, had to defend themselves when they are attacked.
—Nelson Mandela, quoting Chief Luthuli (ANC chairman) and Wilson Conco, in Long Walk to Freedom

This would be a hazardous life, and I would be apart from my family, but when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Most of these [Prison] wardresses had no idea why we were in prison, and gradually began to discover what we were fighting for and why we were willing to risk jail in the first place.

This is precisely why the National Party [Pro Apartheid] was violently opposed to all forms of integration. Only a white electorate indoctrinated with the idea of the black threat, ignorant of African ideas and policies, could support the monstrous racist philosophy of the National Party. Familiarity, in this case, would not breed contempt, but understanding, and even, eventually, harmony.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I still felt an inner conflict between my head and my heart. My heart told me that I was a Thembu, that I had been raised and sent to school so that I could play a special role in perpetuating the kingship. Had I no obligation to the dead? To my father, who had put me in the care of the regent? To the regent himself, who had cared for me like a father? But my head told me that it was the right of every man to plan his own future as he pleased and choose his role in life. Was I not permitted to make my own choices?
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

In the case of the Treason Trial, the three judges rose above their prejudices, their education, and their background. There is a streak of goodness in men that can be buried or hidden and they emerge unexpectedly.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Change in the air in the 1940’s. The Atlantic Charter of 1941, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, reaffirmed faith in the dignity of each human being and propagated a host of democratic principles. Some in the West saw the charter as empty promises, but not those of us in Africa. Inspired by the Atlantic Charter and fight of the Allies against tyranny and oppression, the ANC created its own charter, called African Claims, which called for full citizenship for all Africans, the right to buy land, and the repeal of all discriminatory legislation. We hoped that the government and ordinary South Africans would see that the principles they were fighting for in Europe were the same ones we were advocating at home.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

A freedom fighter must take every opportunity to make his case to the people.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I nevertheless felt a great sense of accomplishment and satisfaction: I had been engaged in a just cause and had the strength to fight for it and win. The campaign freed me from any lingering sense of doubt or inferiority I might still have felt; it liberated me from the feeling of being overwhelmed by the power and seeming invincibility of the white man and his institutions. But now the white man had felt the power of my punches and I could walk upright like a man, and look everyone in the eye with the dignity that comes from not having succumbed to oppression and fear. I had come of age as a freedom fighter.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Banning not only confines one physically, it imprisons one’s spirit. It induces a kind of psychological claustrophobia that makes one yearn not only for freedom of movement but spiritual escape. Banning was a dangerous game, for one was not shackled or chained behind bars; the bars were laws and regulations that could easily be violated and often were. One could slip away unseen for short periods of time and have the temporary illusion of freedom. The insidious effect of bans was that at a certain point one began to think that the oppressor was not without but within.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

The oppressed people and the oppressor are at loggerheads. The day of reckoning between the forces of freedom and those of reaction is not very far off. I have not the slightest doubt that when that day comes truth and justice will prevail……….The feelings of the oppressed people have never been more bitter. The grave plight of the people compels them to resist to the death the stinking policies of the gangsters that rule our country…… To overthrow oppression has been sanctioned by humanity and is the highest aspirations of every free man.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

It stands to reason that an immoral and unjust legal system would breed contempt for its laws and regulations.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

While I normally did not give to African beggars, I felt the urge to give this [white] woman money. In that moment I realized the tricks that apartheid plays on one, for the everyday travails that afflict Africans are accepted as a matter of course, while my heart immediately went out to this bedraggled white woman. In South Africa, to be poor and black was normal, to be poor and white was a tragedy.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

It is true that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones—and South Africa treated its imprisoned African citizens like animals.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

That night I addressed a meeting of African township ministers in Cape Town. I mention this because the opening prayer of one of the ministers has stayed with me over these many years and was a source of strength at a difficult time. He thanked the Lord for His bounty and goodness, for His mercy and His concern for all men. But then he took the liberty of reminding the Lord that some of His subjects were more downtrodden than others, and that it sometimes seemed as though He was not paying attention. The minister then said that if the Lord did not show a little more initiative in leading black man to salvation, the black man would have to take matters into his own two hands. Amen.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Zenani [name for Mandela’s daughter] “what have you brought to the world?” –a poetic name that embodies a challenge, suggesting that one must contribute something to society. It is a name one does not simply possess, but has to live up to.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

When you question a man’s integrity, you can expect a fight.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I went into South African past. I studied our history both before and after the white man. I probed the wars of African against African, of African against white, of white against white. I made a survey of the country’s chief industrial areas, the nation’s transport system, its communication network. I accumulated detailed maps and systematically analyzed the terrain of different regions of the country.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

The workers were all Africans from Alexandra township and they called me “waiter” or “boy” (they never bothered to ask my name). I prepared breakfast for them and made them tea in the late morning and afternoon. They also sent me on errands about the farm, or ordered me to sweep the floor or pick up the trash.

One afternoon, I informed them that I had prepared tea in the kitchen. They came in and I passed around a tray with cups, tea, milk and sugar. Each man took a cup, and helped himself. As I was carrying the tray I came to one fellow who was in the middle of telling a story. He took a cup of tea, but he was concentrating more on his story than on me, and he simply held his teaspoon in the air while he was talking, using it to gesture and tell his tale rather than help himself to some sugar. I stood there for what seemed like several minutes and finally, in mild exasperation, I started to move away. At that point he noticed me, and said sharply, “Waiter, come back here, I didn’t say you could leave.”

Many people have painted an idealistic picture of the egalitarian nature of African society, and while in general I agree with this portrait, the fact is that Africans do not always treat each other as equals. Industrialization has played a large role in introducing the urban African to the perceptions of status common to white society. To those men, I was an inferior, a servant, a person without a trade, and therefore to be treated with disdain. I played the role so well that none of them suspected I was anything other than what I seemed.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defense of our people, our future and our freedom……
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Everywhere I went in Tanganyika my skin color was automatically accepted rather than instantly reviled. I was being judged for the first time not by the color of my skin but by the measure of my mind and character.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly an airplane? But a moment later I caught myself: I had fallen into the apartheid mind-set, thinking Africans were inferior and that flying was a white man’s job.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

[On Egypt]. This is not amateur archeological interest; it is important for African nationalists to be armed with evidence to dispute the fictitious claims of whites that Africans are without a civilized past that compares with that of the West. In a single morning, I discovered that Egyptians were creating great works of art and architecture when whites were still living in caves.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

The flight from Mali to Guinea was more like a local bus than an airplane. Chickens wandered the isles; women walked back and forth carrying packages on their heads and selling bags of peanuts and dried vegetables. It was flying democratic-style and I admired it very much.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

The gracefulness of the slender fishing boats that glided into the harbor in Dakar was equaled only by the elegance of the Senegalese women who sailed through the city in flowing robes and turbaned heads. I wandered through the nearby marketplace, intoxicated by the exotic spices and perfumes. The Senegalese are a handsome people and I enjoyed the brief time that Oliver and I spent in their country. Their society showed how disparate elements—French, Islamic, and African—can mingle to create a unique and distinctive culture.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

In so many ways, the very model of the gentleman for me was an Englishman. Despite Britain being the home of parliamentary democracy, it was that democracy that had helped inflict pernicious system of iniquity on my people. While I abhorred the notion of British imperialism, I never rejected the trappings of British style and manners…………….

Oliver and I saw the sights of the city that had once commanded nearly two thirds of the globe: Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament. While I gloried in the beauty of these buildings, I was ambivalent about what they represented.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

“Now Mandela, you are creating a liberation army not a conventional capitalist army. A liberation army is an egalitarian army. You must treat your men entirely differently than you would in a capitalist army. When you are on duty, you must exercise your authority with assurance and control. That is no different from a capitalist command. But when you are off duty, you must conduct yourself on the basis of perfect equality, even with the lowliest soldier. You must eat what they eat; you must not take your food in your office, but eat with them, drink with them, not isolate yourself.”
—Colonel Tadesse [Ethiopia] advice to Nelson Mandela, quoted in Long Walk To Freedom

During the proceedings, the magistrate was diffident and uneasy, and would not look at me directly. The other attorneys also seemed embarrassed, and at that moment, I had something of a revelation. These men were not only uncomfortable because I was a colleague brought low, but because I was an ordinary man being punished for his beliefs. In a way I had never quite comprehended before, I realized the role I could play in court and the possibilities before me as a defendant. I was the symbol of justice in the court of the oppressor, the representative of the great ideals of freedom, fairness, and democracy in a society that dishonored those virtues. I realized then and there that I could carry on the fight even within the fortress of the enemy.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

“……….History shows that penalties do not deter men when their conscience is aroused, nor will they deter my people or the colleagues with whom I have worked before……….

……….for to men, freedom in their own land is the pinnacle of their ambitions, from which nothing can turn men of conviction aside. More powerful than my fear of the dreadful conditions to which I might be subjected in prison is my hatred for the dreadful conditions to which my people are subjected to outside of prison throughout this country…………whatever sentence Your Worship sees fit to impose upon me for the crime for which I have been convicted before this court, may it rest assured that when my sentence has been completed I will still be moved, as men are always moved, by their conscience; I will still be moved by my dislike of the race discrimination against my people when I come out from serving my sentence, to take up again, as best I can, the struggle for the removal of those injustices until they are finally abolished once and for all………”
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

PRISON NOT ONLY robs you of your freedom, it attempts to take away your identity. …….. As a freedom fighter and as a man, one must fight against the prison’s attempt to rob one of these qualities.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I responded that it was always unacceptable to live in degrading conditions and that political prisoners throughout history had considered it part of their duty to fight to improve prison conditions. [Sobukwe] responded that prison conditions would not change until the country changed. I completely agreed with this, but I did not see why that ought to prevent us from fighting in the only realm in which we now could fight.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

“My brother,” I said to Sobukwe, “there is nothing so dangerous as a leader making a demand that he knows cannot be achieved. It creates false hopes among the people.”
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Winnie subsequently appealed to the minister of justice, who granted her permission to attend the trial on the condition that she did not wear traditional dress. Ironically, the same government that was telling us to embrace our culture in the homelands forbade Winnie from wearing a Xhosa gown into court.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

It was now plain that we would not attempt to use legal niceties to avoid accepting responsibility for actions we had taken with pride and premeditation.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

The challenge for every prisoner, particularly every political prisoner, is how to emerge from prison undiminished, how to conserve and even replenish one’s beliefs. The first task in accomplishing that is learning exactly what one must do to survive. To that end, one must know the enemy’s purpose before adopting a strategy to undermine it. Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality –all with the idea of stamping out that spark that make each of us human and each of us who we are.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I was prepared for the death penalty. To be truly prepared for something, one must actually expect it. One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen. We were all prepared, not because we were brave but because we were realistic. I thought of the line from Shakespeare: “Be absolute for death; for either death or life shall be the sweeter.”
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

As a leader, one must sometimes take actions that are unpopular, or whose results will not be known for years to come. There are victories whose glory lies only in the fact that they are known to those who win them. This is particularly true of prison, where one must find consolation in being true to one’s ideals, even if no one else knows of it.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I was now on the sidelines, but I also knew that I would not give up the fight. I was in a different and smaller arena, an arena for whom the only audience was ourselves and our oppressors. We regarded the struggle in prison as a microcosm of the struggle as a whole. We would fight inside as we had fought outside. The racism and repression were the same; I would simply have to fight on different terms.

Prison and the authorities conspire to rob each man of his dignity. In and of itself, that assured me that I would survive, for nay man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose because I will not part with it at any price under any pressure…………
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being an optimist is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lay defeat and death.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

[In prison] while I desired the privileges that came with higher classifications, I refused to compromise my conduct.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

For us, such struggles—for sunglasses, long trousers, study privileges, equalized food—were corollaries to the struggle we waged outside the prison. The campaign to improve conditions outside the prison was part of the apartheid struggle. It was, in that sense, all the same; we fought injustice wherever we found it, no matter how large, or how small, and we fought injustice to preserve our own humanity.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

A people who do not preserve their memory are a people who have forfeited their history.
—Wole Soyinka, The Burden Of Memory The Muse Of Forgiveness

News was the intellectual raw materials of the struggle…………………………………..

One of the most reliable ways to acquire papers was through bribery, and this was the only area where I tolerated what were often unethical means of obtaining information.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

As I have already mentioned, I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one’s own mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything. Did I make the right decision, was my sacrifice worth it? In solitary, there is no distraction from these haunting questions.

But the human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances. I have found that one can bear the unbearable if one can keep one’s spirit strong even when one’s body is being tested. Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation; your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I always tried to be decent with the warders in my section; hostility was self-defeating. There was no point in having a permanent enemy among the warders. It was ANC policy to try to educate all people, even our enemies: we believed that all men, even prison service warders were capable of change, and we did our utmost to try to sway them.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

But as we quietly explained to him our non-racialism, our desire for equal rights, and our plans for the redistribution of wealth, he scratched his head and said, “It makes more bloody sense than the Nats [The Nationalist Party that was in charge and maintained apartheid].
—Nelson Mandela, in conversation to a warder in Prison. Long Walk To Freedom

...the warders had gone on their own food boycott, refusing to go to their own cafeteria. They were not striking in support of us, but had decided that if we could do such a thing, why couldn’t they?
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Not all debates were political. One issue that provoked much discussion was circumcision. Some among us maintained that circumcision as practiced by the Xhosa and other tribes was not only an unnecessary mutilation of the body, but a reversion to the type of tribalism that ANC was seeking to overthrow. It was not an unreasonable argument, but the prevailing view, with which I agreed, was that circumcision was a cultural ritual that had not only a salutary health benefit, but an important psychological effect. It was a rite that strengthened group identification and inculcated positive values.

The debate continued for years, and a number of men voted in favor of circumcision in a very direct way. A prisoner working in the hospital who had formerly practiced as an ingcibi set up a secret circumcision school, and a number of the younger prisoners from our section were circumcised there. Afterward, we would organize a small party of tea and biscuits for the men, and they would spend a day or two walking around in blankets, as was the custom.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom.

Prison regulations stated that prisoners must stand in the presence of a senior officer. I advocated that we should remain seated, as it was demeaning to have to recognize the enemy when he did not recognize us as political prisoners.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

A mother’s death causes a man to look back on and evaluate his own life. Her difficulties, her poverty, made me question once again whether I had taken the right path. That was always the conundrum: Had I made the right choice in putting the people’s welfare even before that of my own family? For a long time, my mother had not understood my commitment to the struggle. My family had not asked for or even wanted to be involved in the struggle, but my involvement penalized them.

But I came back to the same answer. In South Africa, it is hard for a man to ignore the needs of the people, even at the expense of his own family. I had made my choice, and in the end, she had supported it. But that did not lessen the sadness I felt at not being able to make her life more comfortable, or the pain of not being able to lay her to rest.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I thought about this moment for a long time afterward. Badenhorst had perhaps been the most callous and barbaric commanding officer we had had on Robben Island. But that day in the office, he had revealed that there was another side to his nature, a side that had been obscured but that still existed. It was a useful reminder that all men, even the most seemingly cold-blooded, have a core of decency, and that if their heart is touched, they are capable of changing. Ultimately, Badenhorst was not evil; his inhumanity had been foisted upon him by an inhuman system. He behaved like a brute because he was rewarded for brutish behavior.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

No matter what I suffered in my pursuit of freedom, I always took strength from the fact that I was fighting with and for my own people. Bram [Bram Fischer, an Afrikaan, and Mandela’s lawyer, friend, and colleague in the fight against apartheid—on his death] was a free man who fought against his own people to ensure the freedom of others.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I could hardly believe what I had just heard. It was a revolutionary question: What for? The major [Afrikaan warder] also seemed taken aback, but managed a reply. “It is against regulations,” he said. The young [black] prisoner responded, “Why do you have this regulation? What is the purpose of it?” This questioning on the part of prisoner was too much for the major, and he stomped out of the room, saying, “Mandela, you talk to him.” But I would not intervene on his behalf, and simply bowed in the direction of the prisoner to let him know that I was on his side.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

This was our first exposure to the Black Consciousness Movement. With the banning of the ANC, PAC, and Communist Party, the Black Consciousness Movement helped filled a vacuum among young people. Black Consciousness was less a movement than a philosophy and grew out of the idea that blacks must first liberate themselves from the sense of psychological inferiority bred by three centuries of white rule. Only then could the people rise up in confidence and truly liberate themselves from repression. While the Black Consciousness Movement advocated a nonracial society, they excluded whites from playing a role in achieving that society.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life. A leader must also tend his garden; he, too, plants seeds, and then watches, cultivates, and harvests the result. Like the gardener, a leader must take responsibility for what he cultivates; he must mind his work, try to repel enemies, preserve what can be preserved, and eliminate what cannot succeed.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

It reminds me once again that to truly lead one’s people one must also truly know them.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom, reacting to the book War and Peace by Tolstoy.

The first stage of our election effort was what was known as People’s Forums. ANC candidates would travel all over the country and hold meetings in towns and villages in order to listen to the hopes and fears, the ideas and complaints, of our people. The People’s Forums were similar to the meetings that candidate Bill Clinton held in America on his way to the presidency. The Forums were parliaments of the people, not unlike the meetings of chiefs at the Great Place that I witnessed as a boy.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

After incorporating the suggestions of the Forums, we traveled the country delivering our message to the people. Some in the ANC wanted to make the campaign simply a liberation election, and tell the people: Vote for us because we set you free. We decided instead to offer them a vision of the South Africa we hoped to create. We wanted people to vote for the ANC not just because we had fought apartheid for eighty years, but because we were best qualified to bring about the kind of South Africa they hoped to live in. I felt that our campaign should be about the future not the past.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Just as we told people what we could do, I felt that we must also tell them what we could not do. Many people felt life would change overnight after a free and democratic election, but that would be far from the case. Often, I said to crowds, “Do not expect to be driving a Mercedes the day after the election or swimming in your own backyard pool.” I told supporters, “Life will not change dramatically, except that you will have increased your self-esteem and become a citizen in your own land. You must have patience. You might have to wait five years for results to show.” I challenged them; I did not patronize them: “If you want to continue living in poverty without clothes and food,” I told them, “then go and drink in the shebeens. But if you want better things, you must work hard. We cannot do it all for you; you must do it for yourselves.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced the Oliver Thambos, the Walter Sisulus, the Chief Luthulis, the Yusuf Dadoos, the Bram Fischers, the Robert Sobukwes, of our time—men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom, and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath the soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamond.

It is from these comrades in the struggle that I learned the meaning of courage. Time and again, I have seen men and women risk and give their lives for an idea. I have seen men stand up to attacks and torture without breaking, showing a strength and resiliency that defies imagination. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur. Not only because of the great heroes that I have already cited but because of the courage of the ordinary men and women of my country. I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or of his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrade and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

He [Bram Fischer, one of Mandela’s lawyers for his treason case that sent him to prison for almost thirty years] was stoic, a man who never burdened his friends with his own pain and troubles. As an Afrikaner whose conscience forced him to reject his own heritage and be ostracized by his own people, he showed a level of courage and sacrifice that was in a class by itself. I fought only against prejudice, not my own people.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

We took up the struggle with our eyes wide open, under no illusion that the path would be an easy one. As a young man, when I joined the African National Congress, I saw the price my comrade paid for their beliefs, and it was high. For myself, I have never regretted my commitment to the struggle, and I was always prepared to face the hardships that affected me personally. But my family paid a terrible price, perhaps too dear a price for my commitment.

In life, every man has twin obligations—obligations to his family, to his parents, to his wife and children; and he has an obligation to his people, his community, his country. In a civil and humane society, each man is able to fulfill those obligations according to his own inclinations and abilities. But in a country like South Africa, it was almost impossible for a man of my birth and color to fulfill both of those obligations. In South Africa, a man of color who attempted to live as a human being was punished and isolated. In South Africa, a man who tried to fulfill his duty to his people was inevitably ripped from his family and his home and was forced to live a life apart, a twilight existence of secrecy and rebellion. I did not in the beginning choose to place my people above my family, but in attempting to serve my people, I found that I was prevented from fulfilling my obligations as a son, a brother, a father, and a husband.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

When I walked out of prison that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made many missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.
—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom

Streaming from the Divine

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 02:11:00 +0000

Each time a child is born, the world is created for the first time is a thought that struck me a while ago, while looking at my newborn niece. My brother had called at about 2:00 a.m. as he and his wife set off for the hospital; I had bundled my sleeping children into the car and gone to meet them there, arriving from opposite ends of town. We were allowed to see the baby barely minutes after she was delivered, still covered with vernix caseosa and the umbilical cord clamped. My sister-in-law had been shown the baby, of course, but she hadn’t had the chance to examine every part of her yet, counting her fingers and toes to make sure they were all there. The doctor and nurses were still with her, but she anxiously shouted across to me, “Sister Kehinde, does she have lots of hair?”

Does she have lots of hair? Why would that be the most important thing you want to know about your newborn baby? I wondered, but she had just pushed a big baby out of her, and she was entitled to her anxiety and what she did with it. I reassured her that the baby had lots of hair on her head, and she lay back down.

My children suggested that she looked like one parent or the other as we stared at this new arrival from heaven.

Each time a child is born, the world is created for the first time, and it is not only because the child will come to see the world in her own unique way, which would be hers and hers only though there are zillions of people in the world, and so she would be one in a zillion, and this unique way of hers will be based on the combination of her temperament and how it will react with her environment of her home and parents first and then of her larger world, depending on where that is. But also because she has brought to this world great treasures which have never before been seen on earth, and which will never be seen again, and it is hers and hers alone, and I think that this is the question we are all called to answer.

Zenani is a name which, in Xhosa, asks, What have you brought to the world? It is Nelson Mandela’s daughter’s name, and in his book, Long Walk to Freedom, he writes, “What have you brought to the world?”—a poetic name that embodies a challenge, suggesting that one must contribute something to society.” It is a name one does not simply possess, but has to live up to.

The Xhosa do realize that a newborn child coming into the world did not come empty-handed. That child has brought wonderful gifts from the divine to the inhabitants of the world. The Yorubas (my ethnic group) have the same belief, and believe the way to bring these treasures out of the child and assist him in making his contribution to the world lies solely in the names you give the child. Naming a child is a very big deal that involves the oldest member of the extended family meditating for seven days, to confer with the ancestors in the spirit world about the names for the child and at the end of the seven days, the child is given as many as eight to ten names, and each is a metaphor to actualize the potentials in the child.

A patient, who is an artist, described to me how she felt when her husband, who had been away at a medical conference for a week, returned, and she said, “I looked at him and at that moment I truly felt what Rumi meant when he said, ‘Hundreds of thousands of impressions from the invisible are waiting to come through you.’ I looked at my husband, and it was as if a portion of eternity was expressed through this man, and tears came to my eyes. He was so beautiful, and it was like I was seeing him for the first time and I said to myself, this is why I love him.”

Segi & Mobo 1992

I love people and I strive to practice Alex Haley’s injunction, “Find good and praise it.” I am always looking for that which is streaming from the divine in each person, and I have found a lot of gold in most people. Of course, some people work hard at hiding the beauty that is in them, but I had enjoyed the glint in my father’s eyes on seeing me, and his affect of dismissing what appeared to be impossible so that he could focus on what brings him joy. It has been described as simple-mindedness, but to me it was gold. I love the hugeness of my daughter’s bright eyes and how at her birth she had stared hopefully at me with them. I love my son’s carefree smile that transforms his face into that of what I imagine an angel to look like. I look at my friends, most of them middle-aged as I am, and I feel warm all over when I see how maturity has enriched their beauty. Originally from the tropics, I am now living in a landscape with four seasons, and each is as gorgeous as the next one. I haven’t been able to get over the lushness and how green the foliage has been this spring, and it’s as if I am seeing spring for the first time. I can go on and on about all that is beautiful around me, and they number into the infinity.

But there has to be balance. I have had my own challenges of deserts against the lushness of the foliage in my psyche, but the divine is so generous, and it gives you beauty even in that too. A few months ago, I had a dream that I was visiting my mother’s village of origin, and though the dream informed me that was the landscape, it was different. It was a beautiful island surrounded by calm and sweet water, and I felt at peace. On awaking, I told myself that I had visited Avalon (as in Mists of the Avalon). I meditated on this dream for days and concluded that it was an attempt to transform the mother that I have into a mother who appreciated me and welcomed what I had streamed from the divine.

I didn’t transform her, because I cannot—she has the right to her ways of experiencing the world. But I transformed her origins—that which existed before her—and in that way, I went past and beyond her and got the beauty that should have been mine.

The Migrating Eyes

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 04:29:00 +0000

Consciousness—it is best understood against its opposite, unconsciousness. It is more than being awake as opposed to being in a coma, but where unconsciousness can be imaged as an ocean, in its darkness and vastness, consciousness usually is like the tip of the iceberg (i.e. 1/8 of the iceberg) in the ocean.

It usually is limited and can be with one thing at a time and requires a lot of psychic effort on one’s part, because the default mode of functioning for humans most of the time is to be unconscious, we are in our own dreams all the time and only come out of that dream from time to time to interact with the world. And this is because attainment of consciousness is an injury, an insult and no one volunteers for it. That default mode of psychic functioning is one in which we are all that matters, we are IT and we have it all, and know it all, and in that economy, it is only me, myself and I, but then consciousness which is a prize of conflict resolved, challenges our egocentric position, and conflict is inevitable when we have to interact with another human being, but when endured and apprehended is the only way that we grow.

But the good news is that once consciousness is attained in one area or with regards to an issue, it is never lost, it remains forever ‘out of the ocean’ so to say. If this is challenging for an individual to attain, one can imagine what it must be for the collective as in a society or a country!!

My grandmother used to describe consciousness or the lack of it with a metaphor of migrating eyes. For example, with regards to child rearing practices, and force feeding those babies and toddlers who would just refuse to eat, I had two of them and trust me it is tough for a mother. The mother sits on a low stool, and straddles the child across her left thigh, she traps the child's midriff under her left armpit, so the child is upside down, and almost face down between her legs, she then covers the child's nostrils with her cupped right hand, this forces the child to open his or her mouth to breathe, when the child does this, she pours in the food usually a corn meal or other liquids into the child's mouth using her cupped hand as a funnel, and the child, so she can breathe gulps this down quickly. To the child it feels like imminent death. She did practice it with me, but then she stopped with my younger cousins and when they would refuse to eat and she was frustrated, she would say, ‘when the eyes were at the level of the knees, I would have force fed you.’ In essence, she was referring to a time when there was no awareness of the dangers –physically and psychologically to force feeding a child. Quite a few children died from aspirating the food being forced into them by well-meaning mothers who didn’t want their children to starve to death, or become malnourished.

I have always liked that metaphor of the migrating eyes and I always wonder how far the eyes have come now in the year 2012, because I know for a fact that they are not yet where they are supposed to be, but they are on their way, and would they ever get there? The answer is that can all the contents of the depth of an ocean be fully known?

It is easier to observe the emergence of consciousness in an individual and a good example is a baby growing up and the mark usually is when the child becomes aware that he or she exists, and roughly measured by first memory, and on an average about age 3 years. And that is just consciousness to participate as a human being with the give and take of living with other human beings. That child still has a big task ahead of him or her of being conscious of a lot of things like, “how do I impact other human beings?” How do others experience me?” Why do I do that or this? Why do I hurt or sabotage myself in this way or that way? What are the great things about me that I don’t know are mine? Why do I like this person and not that person? How do I lie to myself, what are the defenses that I use to avoid pain, what are my beliefs and why? Why do certain things make me anxious and why? And more and more…., it is work of a lifetime?

But the degree of consciousness in the person determines their ability to find joy in life, their freedom from fears and anxiety, from depression, guilt and other limiting factors, because consciousness is like bringing light to the darkness of that vast ocean, and the more lit it is, the better it is to see what is in it and to engage them as needed. And the more conscious a person is the more accepting of differences and tolerant of others he or she becomes.

Humanity is made up of a collection of individuals with their different degrees of consciousness, but since we are social beings, we all have to live together and so the consciousness of the group matters a lot. I have come to learn that when it comes to consciousness 50 years for an individual is significant but for the collective, it is but just about five years, and so the consciousness of the collective will be the mean of what it is for all the individuals in the collective. These have been explained in many ways like “an army is only as strong as its weakest soldier.”

The collective is made up of individuals with most of us in the middle and as such this is the definition of ‘normal.’ I will use the standard deviation (SD) curve metaphor here, most of us are between -1 to +1 standard deviation of the bell curve and so these are the people that society takes as the normal and everyone wants to fit into the middle with regards to ways of thinking, seeing, experiencing, lifestyles, who, what and how you love, how your family is set up and who are in your family, fashion, ideas and religious beliefs, recreation, vacation, who you are friends with and many more and going by the SD curve 68.2% of people in every society fit the frame of the ‘normal.’

Then, what about the outliers, the -1 SD and the +1 SD? Society calls them many names— abnormal, freaks, sinners, immoral, devils spawn, infidel, stranger, boogie man, nerd, retards, primitive, cannibals, and all those prejudicial terms that I will not dignify by listing here.

But by going with that SD curve of human distribution they are just outside of the middle, that is all there is to it!!! There is no need for us to fear them.

But then the fascinating thing is that these are the people who bring new things to society. They are the ones who because of who they are, or what they are born with are able to dip into that ocean of unconsciousness where all of our treasures are stored and bring up new things and the result is that all of humanity benefit tremendously from those things that they bring to us, but they pay the price of being called all those names above by the rest of us, and most of the time they are alienated by the middle 68.2% and by their own need to conform and be part of that in-group.

And when the new thing is first introduced, the 68.2% violently rejects it—they laugh at it, ridicule it, harass the host or inventor, threaten, imprison, burn at the stake, make laws against it and many more and we all know these, history is full of them, but then slowly and gradually, the merit is seen and slow acceptance begins. Why do we do these horrendous things to someone bringing something potentially beneficial to us all? Remember, the attainment of consciousness is an injury, because it forces us out of our comfort zone and creates huge anxiety in us.

The other good news is that conflict is inevitable and in spite of ourselves and much as we don’t like it and fight it, we grow. An outlier brings something new to society, we fight it for a while and then we are able to see the merit of it and we join with it and we are all elevated. Some of us refuse and stubbornly so and we pay a prize too. A funny example is when Electronic Medical Records (EMR) was introduced at my work, which requires computer literacy and the ability to either type or pick very fast, an 80 year old colleague spent two weeks learning to use the computer for the first time in his life and he became proficient at it, while another colleague, some 25 years younger refused to use the EMR and with righteous indignation up and quit the job! These were the two extreme reactions, most of us whined and bellyached but got on board and four years later cannot imagine how we did it before the era of EMR.

Most people born after 1985 may not be able to imagine a world without computer technology, but if those of us born before then are going to be honest, we have ridiculed that geek or nerd in our class and yet, it is people of that tribe who have brought us the gift of the cyberspace.

Nelson Mandela once said that Democracy is not a perfect form of government, but it is the best that we have so far, for governing a group of people who have agreed to live together as a community, and for each member to have a voice. There must be checks and balances and there has got to be oppositions to any form of government as these are the conflicts that will continue to challenge us to higher consciousness and evolution, because democracy without opposition and checks and balances deteriorates into dictatorship

I voluntarily migrated from my country of origin to live in a country where democracy has had over three hundred years of practice and I have studied the history of this country and has watched as collective consciousness evolved or using my grandmother’s metaphor, I have watched those eyes migrate up from the knees, and where are they now? Probably still at the level of the hips, but they are moving up and democracy in this country with the participation of most Americans this year, has chosen to move forward with a person’s right to have access to comprehensive health care in a developed country, to love his or her object of affection, with a woman’s right to the health and integrity of her body, and to upholding the fundamentals of what the USA is about, a land of immigrants where there is opportunity to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and equal opportunity for all, regardless of race, gender, religious beliefs as well as for those 68.2% called ‘normal’ and the -1 and +1 standard deviation called the outliers. After all, once upon a time, it was illegal for people of different races to get married and even as recently as in the 1950s, a couple was prosecuted in the Commonwealth of Virginia for this, but today, we have a product of such a union as the president of this great country.

I like where the eyes are now, and I firmly believe in humanity that it will continue to evolve and hopefully in my life time, will get to the level of the belly button.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available at your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

And Then I Fed my Father’s Dog.

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Sat, 14 Jul 2012 17:39:00 +0000

He had a booming laugh,

He was a very handsome man and he knew it.

He knew how to read the minds of a toddler and the kinds of play that they loved,

And he would join in with them and go on forever.

Such was my father’s love.

Symbiotic in your preschool years but freeing after your first day of school.

He loved to hold court, surrounded by his children while the gifted one of us told of folklore.

He did love his beer, as he sat bare-chested in the evening cooling air, but I hated to rub his back.

I didn’t understand him, I was a child and he towered and as such scared me.

He loved his dog Tiger to distraction, but Tiger had love for him and only him.

I hated that he made me give to Tiger, the bone from my drumstick that I was still working on,

And in his absence, when I called to Tiger to come with me on a walk, it would give me an arrogant baleful look and return to lazying in the sun, stupid dog!!

The background noise of my childhood: my father insisting “let the boy do what he wants to do.”

The other was not happy, "make him do what I want,”

“It’s his life, let the boy do what he would do,” my father pronounced and returned to his newspaper and Tiger, watching the scene, would cozy up to his legs.

Such was my father’s love. It didn’t take the stance of conquering the world and laying it at my feet. He left the conquering of the world to me and my soul’s dictates.

His love was neither hovering nor interfering, it was like that of a mother bird, when the time was ripe it kicked you out of the nest.

I did not know this gift at the time, feeling it to be indifference.

I thought I loved just my father’s mother, who fed me till I was seven years old, insisting that the Amala was too hot for me to feed myself.

She insisted that we, the young ones eat in the kitchen by the firewood fueled hearth on cold harmattan mornings. I love fireplaces till today.

She had baskets and pots of treasures in her room and my pastime was to go through them,

“Tule, tule ti owo bo oku loju”

“Are you looking to poke the dead in the eyes?”

Terrified, I would stop for couple of days, but the baskets and pots always beckoned to me,

“Come and we will tell you our secrets.” I did grow up to hunt down secrets.

I thought I loved just his beloved hometown Ogbomosho Ajilete. I learnt the joys of exploration, of free roaming, unencumbered by rules of mothers.

In season, I ate the best mangoes in the world, and paid with diarrhea for days,

I ate at buka all the time and I played till I dropped into comatose sleep.

I thought it was just that I loved my sister; that one made of honey, my pilot of roaming.

Ile Aresin is the name of his family house, and it had been standing eons before my arrival, a treasure house of history.

It houses the dead—we played on their tombstones, the living, there are at least four generations of extended family living there, and the promises of the yet to be born.

I thought it was just that I loved his family house.

I was angry; he never paid me a compliment,

But I came to the insight; he did not need to give me compliments because to him I was perfection.

I got unconditional, unquestioning acceptance from only him—the glint in his eyes always told me this.

I experienced his anger, and it was terrible, he was devalued a lot, his was the time when the love of a father was expected to carry only a sword of thoughts to cut up the world, but his love wore an apron.

I finally arrived, I did love my father, and so when I ran into his beloved dog Tiger in my dreams, I took the time to take him into the house and I fed him.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available at your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Kehinde's Israel

noreply@blogger.com (Patty Cabanas) — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 20:45:00 +0000

I will begin this blog with a disclaimer: This is NOT a political commentary on the State of Israel by any means.

Sea of Galilee

Israel is a very beautiful country and this is one thing that I never heard said about Israel until after my trip when I stumbled on a page “Israel is Beautiful” on Facebook. But like someone responded, “Is it any more beautiful than the rest of the middle east or the whole of the Mediterranean coast for that matter?” and another response was ‘my mother in law visited there a few years ago and she didn’t think it was all that.” Well, for many years now, I have learnt not to listen to just the words being spoken but to understand what is doing the speaking. And in these situations what was speaking didn’t take anything away from me about the beauty of Israel.

My son said to his sister, “Mom is Jewish now, she came back from Israel and now decorates the house with mezuzah and menorah,” he left the other half out and that is “Mom is probably Arabic too because there are also hamsa by the doors to keep away the evil eye, figurines of a camel and Aladdin lamp on the mantel and a Bedouin Arab quilt hanging on the wall, not to speak of lots of Arabic jewelry and scarves bought from the souks in Jerusalem.”

A few weeks after I returned from my one week trip to Israel, I had this dream:

I am driving by in a landscape that is unmistakably Michigan and I saw a big road sign pointing to Migdal, so I followed the road and I arrived at Migdal, and it isn’t just a namesake of the Migdal—the birth place of Mary Magdalene that is in the Galilee area in Israel, but it is the very Migdal that is in Israel that is now in Michigan in the USA, and in the manners of dreams, it was conveyed to me that the USA has stolen this real Migdal from Israel. I was furiously indignant, and had a lot of un-publishable words to say about it in my dream. On waking, the meanings of the dream are totally personal to me, and my psychology. And Migdal was returned to her rightful place in Israel.

Why did the dream use Migdal and not the Sea of Galilee or River Jordan or Jerusalem? It has to do with the figure of Mary Magdalene and what I personally think of her and what she means to me in my psyche, which is totally different from the New Testament portrayal of her. For me, she is a symbol of femininity, humility, humanness, sexuality and absolute love and devotion. And this, is my understanding of religion, it is a very personal thing and not a thing that can be transmuted to another person in the ways that we try to do so.

I was raised on the Bible and I love the stories of the Bible especially the stories of the Old Testament because everything about humanity is there, and I mean everything. And I still remember back to Sunday school and elementary school, listening to these stories used to make me so happy as I would disappear into them, and the landscapes and be there with Eve talking to the snake in the Garden of Eden, to Joseph and his brothers and his coat of many colors. I was with the Israelites in Egypt and on their 40 year trek. I developed a crush on Joshua at the age of 5 as he conquered Canaan and the wall of Jericho came crashing down, and his name is still one of my favorite names of the Bible.

I was there when puny David fell the giant Goliath and for a little girl it did give me a lot of hope. What about Ruth and her unwavering love for her mother in law? What to make of Job and his trials? I wept many tears for him, and the wisdom of King Solomon; and like Bisi, one of my travel companions repeatedly pointed out the many times that we were at the spice markets—Queen Esther being bathed in spices for a year. And I can go on and on.

Octavio Paz said, “When history wakes, image becomes deed, the poem is achieved: poetry goes into action.”

What he is talking about is that history is very much alive today as the events were when they were taking place hundreds or thousands of years ago, the only difference is that the person apprehending the history based on her own unique mind makes of the history what she is going to make of it. This means that history is not just an objective collection of facts and data, but it is history because there were some people’s tears and blood in the making of it, that is, there are emotions involved. And that is why as in popular dictum, a cigar is not just a cigar—what is the history of cigars for this one individual, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar when all of us try to make one common meaning of it.

Judean Hills

I adopted a tree on Northwestern highway in Farmington Hills and I call it ‘My Tree,’ I try to drive by it as often as I can so I can see My Tree. And so for me, it carries a lot of meanings because when I met it 13 years ago, the ground beneath my feet was very shaky, and its form, sturdiness, standing firm, with lots of branches coming out of it at every angle to form a composite of something in unity, related and very much together was very comforting to me and there it stood unwavering year in and year out and in every season. It is My Tree in my history but it is a tree that many people don’t see at all because it disappears into the background of a beautiful Midwestern town’s landscape.

The story of the Bible is a myth of the people who live in this region and even though I wasn’t born in that region and none of my ancestors came from that region, my psyche was wired in its formative years on the myth of this region as recorded in the Bible, thanks to the Christian missionaries who were part of the colonization of the part of the world that was to become southern Nigeria and the Nigerian psyche, and I mean the Nigerian psyche (even Muslim, as the myth of the Koran is from this very region as well, because the northern part of Nigeria was colonized via the Sahara desert by the Islamic jihadist, in a religious and economic colonization before the British came by boat through the Atlantic Ocean) was formatted on this mythology.

And as such you can say that I am at the least bi-mythic, because side by side with the Christian upbringing that I received on Sundays in church and at the missionary schools that I attended, were also the imbibing of the Yoruba myth that did not require any formal instructions. Ogun, Sango, Oya, Yemoja and the other hundreds of gods and goddesses in the Yoruba pantheon (comparable to the Greek mythology in its composition and comprehension) were in the air that I breathed, but tragically, the accent on them were not one of love or comfort like the ones in the Bible even as my crush Joshua was conquering Canaan and killing and enslaving the inhabitants.

The mythic stories of the Bible were depicted as holy and the myths of my ancestors were depicted evil, and as such, you call on the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob when you need comforting and help, and you call on Ogun, or Sango when you wish an un-imaginable calamity on your enemy.

Myths help the psyche with symbol formations, and the more we are able to form symbols, the healthier we become and vice versa, the less able to form symbols, the more symptoms we have because symptoms are actually degraded symbols. And so the myth of the Bible were health promoting as symbols and the myth of the Yorubas are symptoms forming and thus pathologizing because of their degradation, should I ask what that has done to our self esteem?

What we, Yorubas have lost in the process as an example, the valuable lesson that the myth of Ogun could have enriched us with and had we not lost that, we might not be a people who breed dictators. Here is the story.

Ogun, the god of war and of iron—the founding father of technology as we understand it, was a fierce warrior who did not take any prisoner. He also loved his palm wine with no apologies. So, there was this group of people that were continuously being harassed by their neighbors who would wage wars on them, capture and enslave them. The rest of the people asked Ogun for his help and he led their army into battle against the enemies and conquered them; and many more enemies like that. They were so relieved and grateful that they begged him to become their king, but Ogun knew his limitation.

He knew that he was a warrior and not a king and his job was defending the borders and not sitting on a throne in the center of the town, but the people will not take his no for an answer. They begged and appealed and pleaded and finally wore him down and against his innate nature, he became their king.

And then came a new wave of enemies to conquer, and Ogun led his army into a defensive war and vanquished all of them, but then drunk from the triumph of war plus/minus palm wine, he turned on his men and perceiving them to be enemies, vanquished them as well.

Had we not degraded this wonderful symbol into symptom in Nigeria, perhaps we wouldn’t have had so many years of military dictatorship as soldiers are built for pillaging and not for the center of a city and definitely not for the throne. But sadly, the only way that we nod at Ogun now is for most drivers to try to kill any dog that they see trying to cross the road, as dogs are Ogun’s animals.

And so there was a split in my psyche, there was no continuity of blessings running from my ancestors of just 200 years ago to me today (and we are all surprised at the state of Nigeria?) whereas for an average inhabitant of Israel, be they Jewish, or Muslim, they have that continuity and they are not split by a foreign mythology.

Yes, there is a tone of envy there on my part, but all is not lost, I am bi-mythic or even tri-mythic and I believe that it has enriched my psyche more, and this is because I have taken the time to educate myself on the mythology of my ancestors and as such I now have their blessings, and so for me, Sango, the god of thunder and lightning doesn’t just send his wrath to destroy people but in the wake of his sky splitting activities come life giving rains. Yemoja, as her river flows brings fructification to the soil and blessings to the wombs of women. Oya for me is not a witch to cower before but she is the mother of all, the veritable mate of Sango and a woman to be respected at all time, as every woman and everything that is feminine in us is to be respected.

And so when I had the good fortune of visiting Israel on the invitation of a dear friend who took the time to drive us around the country, I felt as if I had stepped into history and my imagination of when I was a child did not lie to me, I saw where the shepherds tended their sheep and goats at that time and they are still tending them, just that the shepherd boys are nomadic Bedouin Arab today. The Sea of Galilee is as misty as I had visualized it and after staring at it for a while, I could see Jesus walking on it.

“I’ll lift up my eyes onto the hills,

From whence does my help come….”

Is a prayer that when I now say it, I feel it more because I have seen those hills, and they are numinous and awe inspiring.

The wall around the city of Jerusalem is still there as well as the seven gates into the city. We spent two nights at a hotel right across from King David’s tower. We walked on the Via Dolorosa in the very manner that Jesus walked with his heavy cross on it to Golgotha, it was a market then and it is still that same busy market today.

We visited Masada, the retreat of the unpopular King Herod of the time of the birth of Jesus and saw the mountains of his ancestors—the Moabites.

River Jordan is still there. Mary’s well, where she used to fetch water is still there in Nazareth.

There were date palms, and olive grooves all over the place and I made it a point to find a fig tree.

So in the end, I am lucky that the British colonized Nigeria and brought their religion with them, because it has enriched my psyche and I have been blessed by the ancestors in the Bible, as I am being blessed by my own ancestors.

At the end of the trip, I was very happy, and I promised to return at a future date and take my children with me. I tried to put what I felt into words, and it was a struggle. To my Nigerian friend, I asked them to remember how it was when the pilgrims to Mecca and Medina returned home after the Haj. They used to be happy, content, have this peaceful look about them, and some of them that I knew changed for the better for they have been reborn.

To my American friends, I said that it was a feeling of things coming together for me, when before they have been scattered all over the place, it was a feeling of re-gathering them into a new unity, and incidentally this is the meaning of the word, religion, relig-ios, to come back together. And it is the grounding that My Tree on Northwestern highway gave me that time 13 years ago, and for which I still love till today.

I have another mythic home to visit, and that is Greece for the western education that I have received all of my life has its foundation in the mythology of the Greeks.

I’ll conclude with this poem:

Your Own Myth-- Jelaluddin Rumi

Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?

Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?

Who comes to a spring thirsty, and sees the moon reflected in it?

Who like Jacob, blind with grief and age, smells the shirt of his lost son

and can see again?

Who lets a bucket down and brings up a flowing prophet?

Or like Moses goes for fire and finds what burns inside the sunrise?

Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies, and opens a door to the other world.

Solomon cuts open a fish, and there is a gold ring.

Omar storms in to kill the prophet and leaves with blessings.

Chase a deer and end up everywhere!

An oyster opens his mouth to swallow one drop.

Now there’s a pearl.

A vagrant wanders empty ruins.

Suddenly he’s wealthy.

But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others.

Unfold you own myth, without complicated explanations,

so everyone will understand the passage

We have opened you.

Start walking towards Shams. Your leg will get heavy and tired.

Then comes a moment of feeling the wings you’ve grown,

lifting.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

I Dreamt of Many Children

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:21:00 +0000

What treasures are you bringing to me? I asked of them.

For that is the meaning of children in a dream.

They are never still, busy, running, climbing,

jumping, skipping, pushing, touching, breathing,

hugging, crying, laughing, and through it all,

wide-eyed with expectations.

Expectations and Anticipations.

For they believe,

that I have it in me.

They want me to bring them to life.

Bring them to life?

What a huge responsibility!

“But you can do it.” their anticipating gaze pulled at me.

“But you are so many.” I cringed away from my destiny.

“Yes, we are.” They chorused in giggles.

“And there are many more of us. There are zillions of us where we came from, and if you bring us to life, many more will come, and they will keep coming and coming and coming and coming . . .”

I am the wide-eyed one now,

not in expectation but in terror.

I had wondered before in my waking mind

‘what would it be like to have 365 children,

One for each day of the year?’

Terror! Abdication!

But they could read my thoughts.

“No silly,” they giggled again, as they jumped, skipped, hugged and kissed,

And yet some were in the tree that I didn’t see before.

“You will stay and embrace us, and we, we will take care of you.

All you have to do is hug us and listen to us.”

“That is all?” Skepticism!

“Yes, silly,” they chorused again, and they were touching me, breathing on me, shoving me, pulling me, jumping on my knees….

“Don’t you remember me, I was there with you when you were one year old, and we were going to love the world with all of our hearts, we were going to eat it up, that was how much we loved the world,” she kissed me on my lips,

“But then, you stopped really tasting things and kissing me, and I missed you dreadfully.”

And my middle aged heart felt an ‘ouch.’

“And me, silly, we stared at everything, the world was so glorious and we put pictures of the world in our heart, our eyes were the cameras then, look inside you, the pictures are still there, in their infinite beauty, I look at them everyday.” She tapped on my eyes.

“But then you stopped taking pictures, and you really stopped seeing, and I missed you dreadfully.” And my middle aged heart felt a second ouch.

“And me silly, we used to hug the world, we were all hands and arms, we touched everything and hugged everything. I can still feel everything in my hands and arms; have you forgotten?” She pulled violently at my hands. A third ouch in my middle aged heart.

“And, oh how we cried!! It was the best music in the world, we cried and cried and beckoned to the world to come to us, that was our language then, and what a beautiful language. And sometimes the world came and sometimes the world ignored us, but that wasn’t the point. Do you remember how we felt after a good cry? Yes you do. We felt like the morning after a heavy rainfall, and everything is calm, cool and gentle. How we loved a good cry. We still cry, you didn’t desert me girl,” she draped her adorable arms around my shoulders.

“That is our one talent, and you hung on to it.” And on and on . . .

“When we were five, we were going to make a big loving family." And the ‘nth’ ouch to my poor heart.

“When we were six, we said we would love our husbands to pieces." Another ouch to my heart.

“When we were nine, we promised not to be mean back when people were mean to us." Another ouch to my heart.

“And we still loved to cry and we still felt like the morning after a heavy rain fall, and we love the feeling. . ."

“Yes, we do.” I smiled and she smiled back as she tugged on my cheeks.

“It is our one true talent.” We said in unison and giggled and said “Jinx,” and giggled again.

“When we were twelve, we promised to be beautiful, inside and outside."

“When we were fifteen, we used to cry a lot, we got our heart broken every day, every goddamn day and we wept, and we felt like the morning after a heavy rain fall.” And we both smiled at one another.

And the children from the tree came down and pulling and shoving started in zillions of voices, and we were going to work very hard, we were going to keep hope alive, we were going to thank all that came our way, we were going to smile all the time, we were going to be . . .

Finally, I asked, “have we done any of that?”

“We did some of them,” they chorused.

“But you grew up and forgot about us and that hurt us a lot and we cried.”

“I am so sorry.”

“Its okay, we never go away, we hang around, trying to catch your attention, and to remind you of your promises to us. It’s great that you are talking to us now. And see, it doesn’t take much, just embrace us, that is all there is to it.”

And the ouches to my middle age heart started to slowly ease off.

Happy New Year! Every day is a new beginning for us not to forget the promises we once made to ourselves.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Crossroads.

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 02:50:00 +0000

I grew up with this proverb, “Iko rita meta, idamu alejo,” i.e. A crossroad is the predicament of a visitor/stranger. And each time I heard it, I had this image of a stranger arriving in the metropolis that was Ibadan of my childhood from my grandmother’s small village in Ekiti, and he would be in the traditional four piece suit of Fila, Agbada, Buba and Sokoto all of which were made of Aso Oke and he would have a horse tail in his hand. He would be standing at an intersection with three, four or more roads meeting and he would be reeling around and around and around in confusion while waving the horse tail, perhaps to ward off the ever present flies, or, to maybe clear the fog that he thinks its in his mind for he knew he was in a quandary.

Why this image? I grew up in a household ruled by my maternal grandmother who missed her small village very much and so most of her discourses were about this nostalgia. And her relatives did come down often to visit bringing with them lots of yams, some vegetables, chickens and a goat once in a while along with lots of stories about the happenings in the village and these, my grandmother would savor with relish. The relatives in turn would be overwhelmed with the city teeming with zillions of people and so many roads and vehicles, and my grandmother in turn would reassure them.

There were other references to crossroads as well, I remember walking to my elementary school with my twin brother early in the mornings, and on arriving at certain crossroads in our neighborhood we would find pieces of broken clay pots, and in some of the larger pieces would be a peculiar combination of stuff—palm oil, a coin, dead rat, chicken skull, some large feather belonging to some bigger bird like a hawk, and once we saw the head of a dog, at another time, the eye of a big animal, and usually some precious beads like corals and other weird and bizarre combinations of things. Each time we see this, I would freak out as I felt my head expand and contract, and as we had been warned several times by my superstitious grandmother and other housemaids, we would give the offering, for that was what they were a wide berth as we hurried along on our way.

Another thing about the crossroads of my childhood was that they were notorious for motor vehicle accidents. There was also the famous University College Hospital that my grandmother would refer to as simply ‘Orita-Mefa’ (Intersection where six roads met), and the accompanying image for me is one of pain as in painful intramuscular injection of immunization or medication as we received all our medical care from this hospital.

Then there was a popular song by Ebenezer Obey about his enemies in an attempt to harm him dabbling in juju and placing ebo—offering at crossroads. And finally there was the drama on Television and a character in this drama series was Eshu, and his province was the crossroads, where he would stand and confuse the heck out of people, not just travelers or visitors but anyone passing by was his potential victim.

I remember one drama in specific where two BFF—best friends forever, who loved each other very much, had been friends since their childhood, and had never had an argument or fought in their lives and as such were like one soul in the manner in which they could read each other’s thoughts and anticipate each others joys and sorrows and were always at each others beck and call. They were a match made in heaven and the envy of everyone. On this particular day, they fell victim to Eshu’s pranks and to the shock of the whole community started to fight and were determined to beat each other to death.

What happened? They were walking by and chatting to one another amicably when Eshu walking towards them from the opposite direction passed them by walking purposefully and right in between the two of them. He greeted them politely and they returned his greetings in turn and Eshu went on his way.

The following ensued:

Friend #1: ‘Can you believe that odd guy, is he color blind? He’s wearing an orange Agbada with a red cap.”

Friend #2: “No, he’s not, its okay to wear black cap with orange Agbada, black goes with everything.”

Friend #1: “I see that you are the color blind one.”

Friend #2: No, I’m not, you are the one calling black, red.”

They argued and were both getting angrier by the minute and before we knew it, they were calling each other names and accusations were flying back and forth as Friend #2 started to question the sanity of Friend #1 if he was calling black, red. And then there were accusations about a business judgment of five years before that had caused both of them lots of money. And another accusation of how one friend had inadvertently flirted with the other’s wife, thinking that it was her sister, and on and on it went and then the blows started to fly.

The ever present concerned citizens milling around ran to the fighting men and separated them as they admonished them, two grown men fighting in public, had they no self respect? So they narrated the story to the concerned citizens and Eshu was in the midst of the crowd and he listened to their narration. In the narration too, the two bosom friends started to get heated up again and the citizens had to stand between the two of them. At some point, Eshu came to the forefront and asked them if it was him that they saw, and the two men eagerly said “Yes.” He showed them his cap, and on one side the cap was red and on the other side it was black.

Eshu is Yoruba’s trickster and god of the crossroads and there are tricksters in mythologies of other cultures. In the Congos, his name is Papa Legba, he is associated with red, emblematic with the heat and intensity of the crossroads. He is a cruciform figure with the extended arms suggesting either prohibition or guidance or the more sinister possibility of the crossroads drawing the wayfarer into a state of confusion and panic.

In Greek mythology, the goddess of the crossroads is Hecate since the crossroad is considered the opening of the underworld in which Hecate was the mistress. Hecate is believed to arrive at the doorways of those laboring toward birth, a midwife, mediating that crossroads of becoming or obstruction.

Crossroads are symbolic of choice, union of opposites, the meeting place of time and space. It is the place of burials of suicides, vampires and felons to ensure their confusion of ways and prevent their return to haunt the living.

Crossroads are associated to Ganesha of the Hindu pantheon, a god with an elephant head and he is the lord of beginnings and of obstacles, and Janus in Roman pantheon, the god of beginnings and transitions and of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is a two faced god since he looks to the future and the past, and the concept of January is based on him. Crossroads are locus of extreme potency and ambivalent gods able to contain and synthesize opposites flowing into one another. At crossroads one confronts the necessity of choice and the immensity of fate. It is a matrix of union and also of separating, parting, splitting, of meeting and farewell.

Crossroads, considered to be the opening to the underworld represent the possibility of many ways and also commitment to the individual path. Legendary, the crossroads suggest a junction where consciousness must regard the unconscious, and be accountable to the whole self in its ambivalence (An Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper and The Book of Symbols).

What do all these mean? Crossroads as symbols and metaphors make us question ourselves and prevent us from becoming rigid and dogmatic in our self-belief. It is as if they are the fault that lets in the contents of the unconscious into our conscious psyche, fructifying them with things that have been suppressed, repressed or things that have never before been brought to consciousness.

Oedipus, the famous crossroader of literature made a choice at the meeting point of his historical inheritance, fate and destiny, though this could have been attributed to road rage, but the history he had fled caught up with him and the choice he made at the crossroad was actually to actualize it. He lamented: “Oh three roads, dark ravine, woodland and way/Where three roads met: you, drinking my father’s blood/My own blood spilled by my own hand: can you remember/ The unspeakable things I did there, and the things I went on from there to do?” (Sophocles, 72).

As I was writing this piece, ‘Scent of a Woman’ was playing. I left it on but muted the television because it’s a movie I have seen many times before, but I have my favorite scenes at which I turned on the volume. One was when Colonel Slade (played by Al Pacino) went to Charlie Simms’ (played by Chris O’Donnell) school in lieu of his parents for the trial, and in his eloquent speech said he did come to many crossroads in his life but he had never made the right choice, even though he knew which road to choose, but he did not choose them because they were too damn hard, but that Simms came to his own crossroads and he chose not to snitch on his peers, even though he faced possible expulsion from the prestigious preparatory school which would mean returning home to his not wealthy parents in Oregon, defeated, and with his tails between his hind legs.

Simms actually had been at a bigger crossroad that weekend he spent in New York City when the alcoholic Slade, who was living out his planned last few days. He had frustrated Simms to no end and had broken every rule possible including him, a blind man driving an expensive rented car, such that if Simms had abandoned him (as Slade invited him to do on many occasion that weekend), we, the audience wouldn’t have faulted him.

Simms was at a crossroad; to let an annoying, miserable, bitter, blind, hateful, and suicidal SOB who had nothing to lose in life and who had made his life hell, but was in his custody, and was wielding a deadly weapon that he knew how to use very well, kill himself, or stand between him and his gun and as such put his own life at risk. Simms chose the harder and scarier path and prevented Slade’s suicide.

What I took from the movie is Simm’s integrity and his ability each time at the crossroad of his life to choose the path that led to his growth and development. Al Pacino won a well deserved Oscar for his performance but the fictional Simms won the Oscar of life.

I am someone who is impressed by the genius of our dreams and the stuff that they crank up night after night and for me and based on my own psychology, I dream of crossroads a lot. And after a while I came to appreciate that it really is a place of making choices as new possibilities are offered to us. And the choices are either to stay with the old and outdated story or to begin a new story, because the crossroads of real life or of our inner life are actually roads where new life and opportunities are presented to us. Paul Valery said: “The bottom of the mind is paved with crossroads.”

And as they are the fault lines where the unconscious is opened to meet consciousness, something new, usually a treasure, or a potential that is in us all along, is presented to us at this point of our lives and we are left to choose and follow the unknown, unfamiliar, narrow and probably dark and scary path or to return as we have come, to return to a well known, well traveled, worn out, broad, and well lit path, but it is of the old story. And just as in that image from my childhood of that well suited man from my grandmother’s village, will he choose a road, any road, and follow it to its logical conclusion and that road might actually lead him to his relative’s house in Ibadan or will he cower in defeat, get onto the next lorry and return to his tiny village, defeated by life?

And if he were to take the path that he didn’t know, what will become of him and who would he meet on the way? What adventures would he get himself into; and if at the end of it all, would he still remain the same or would he have gained the confidence to tackle the wilder Lagos next?

When at the crossroads of our lives—whether our inner life or our outer life (before the era of GPS), we are not aware of the feelings of changes in the air, what we feel is dreadful anxiety, and all we can think of is where to get some Xanax, or a drink.

Anxiety, a feeling that is difficult to sit with, is a sign of inner conflict and is one affect that has driven many people to seek counseling from which ever place they do, from their psychotherapists, psychiatrists, pastors, Imam, priests, hairdressers or bartenders. “What should I do? I don’t know what to do, please tell me.” But can anyone really tell us what to do? It is our crossroad and not theirs and to tell us what to do would be transmitting their own values which are very unique and individual things.

And conflict is a great midwife; it is that which assists the delivery of new possibilities in us if we don’t flee from it. Conflict is symbolized in mythology and dreams by the number two, a thing that was once one is not enough anymore and it becomes two—that one thing and its opposite, to do or not to do, to stay or to go, to stand or to sit and so on and so forth. And out of these two, a third must be born and this third is the new possibility and this is the making of a crossroad. And this third can only be born by sitting with the conflict, that thing and it’s opposite.

A good example is that drama of my childhood, of the two best friends. They were of one mind and were at peace. This is a good place to be, and most of us crave it but it is not a place of growth, but rather of stagnation because there is a whole lot to us as human beings and maturity is the ability to live most of what and who we are even when they are in contradiction, in harmony.

What Eshu did is to help them see the possibility of discord and that they had resentments and some degree of rage and hatred towards one another but which they would not allow themselves to be aware of. And this is what came out in the fist fight they engaged in. Before the fight, they were just one sided human being, all they knew was the love that they had for one another and that was it, but after the fight, they have become more human, more rounded, fleshed out and three dimensional human beings capable of hate and of love and all other emotions that are in between those two, and it is the balancing of this in harmony that makes a human being. So Eshu in this context has brought something that existed in these friends all along, he didn’t introduce it to them, they had had it in them long before Eshu came along.

This is how crossroads, internally introduce the new thing into our lives, the thing that we have always had in us but which we were not aware of and when we become aware of its presence gives us more consciousness and enriches our lives.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Oriki is ‘The Call of the Head.’

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:06:00 +0000

It is poetry loved by the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and perhaps other parts of Africa and had been taken by the black race into the Diaspora because a vestige of it was featured in the movie “Ali,” in which the character of Drew Bundini Brown played by Jamie Foxx, repeatedly sang poetry to Mohammed Ali before, during and after his fights, calling on Ali’s ‘head.’ There is a poignant scene in which Ali had kicked Brown off his entourage after he admitted to selling Ali’s championship belt on the street for $500 to feed his heroin addiction, Brown shows up to beg for his job back and he was clean of drugs; Ali relents when he starts the call of the head poetry—“Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee,” and the two of them finished the poem in unison.

At the lips of talented orators, it is something to behold. An example was the Premier of Western Nigeria in the early 1960s Chief S.L. Akintola all of whose political speeches be it state of the union address, canvassing for votes, cursing out his enemies, or lauding his supporters were poetic orations powerful enough to hypnotize a person.

Oriki includes family history, praise, warnings, admonishments and admirations. It is not flattery, but based on real accomplishments and failures of the family. It goes back many generations, thus each family has the Oriki unique to them. It is sang for a person usually by his parents and loved ones in times when he/she is depressed, challenged, going through trials or tribulations, or after the person has accomplished something remarkable like moving from one threshold to another, or as an appeal to the person. If the individual is in despair, it reminds the person whom he is, where he came from, and where he is hoping to go. It is one of the rituals to accompany the person through the challenging tasks of life and for him/her to know that others have faced the challenges before and have succeeded.

It is oration that is in the province of the gods and it is sung as an obeisance and in humility before a power that is unconscious and as such unbelievably powerful. The Yorubas sing them in the worshipping of gods like Ogun—god of Iron, and Sango—god of lightening and thunder. It’s a parallel to Greek mythology as recorded by say Sophocles complete with the verses and the choruses.

Winnicott asks “Is it not from being gods that we become man?” and actually Oriki tells us what is possible in the human realm and as such humanizes us. This is because when we are unconscious we are identifying with the gods and Oriki takes this into consideration and gradually shrinks the psyche of the individual down to its appropriate human size without ignoring the potentials that are inherent in him/her.

It is so embedded in Yoruba culture and language that almost everyone has amongst their six or seven names an Oriki, usually given to them by their grandmothers as her way of saying to the child, “this is how I see you, a child to adore, cherish and spoil,” which is what grandmothers do. Examples of such names for girls are Ajike—this is a child that I will cherish each morning that I awake, Asunke is the child that I will cherish even as I sleep, Aduke, this is a child that I will compete with others to cherish, Abeke –for this child, I will plead for the opportunity to cherish her and Ashabi—this is a child that was highly selected to be born and she continues to select the best for me. And for boys are names like Akanni—I especially selected him to be mine, Isola—He creates wealth for me all the time, and so on and so forth.

‘Head’ in this context is the depository of all that makes the person the human being that he or she is. It is our fate, destiny, and in psychology, we ‘ll say, the unconscious contents of the persons psyche which though not consciously known by the individual, nevertheless directs the person hither and thither as if he/she were under the control of a puppet master.

That it is ‘the call of the head,’ shows that the contents of the person’s unconscious are being called upon for them to become conscious and thus dynamic for the ego; the contents in terms of deposited family history/legends.

Freud said “There probably exists in the mental life of the individual, not only what he has experienced himself, but an archaic heritage. The archaic heritage includes not only dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experience of former generations.”

I was excited to find scientific and confirmatory explanation in a psychoanalytic paper on the function of Oriki (though it wasn’t called that, and not that I needed the confirmation, I have benefited from its function all of my life), but according to Lynch(1991), “it is a kind of idealized merger in which the self-object provides a certain level of calmness and reintegration of the self structure of the [child], especially at times when the child’s self structure may have been somewhat fragmented as a result of some trying experience, failure or upset in his or her world. The idealized self-object restores the enfeebled self of the child to a new level of cohesion or maturity. Over the long term, this kind of idealization can gradually help the child internalize the idealized self-object image and assist the child in later years in the formation of internalized goals and ideal for itself.”

What this is saying is that growing up is hard and painful and we need all the help that we can get. As a child is growing up, or as the child in each of us regardless of how old we are is being hopeful and reaching out for whatever it is that we all reach out for all the time, be it ambition, love, friendship, happiness and etc. we are putting ourselves in a very vulnerable position for rejection or loss or even the uncertainty that we will get what it is that we are hungering after, or that we even deserved it. The ego is that part of our psyche that does the desiring and it may in the process despair or be terrified.

But there are a lot to us, there is that part of us that do deserve these great things that we want, and these great things are in us already, but as unconscious potentials. And they are in that part of us that had been in this world forever and for generations and these parts of us are the inheritance from our ancestors who have gone before us, and tried these things and had their results one way or the other, and this is because everything has been tried before.

So when our mother or grandmother or aunt ‘calls our head’ because they can see that we are anxious, afraid, holding back or that we are facing something major, that ‘call’ tells us that it is possible and that it has been done before, or warns us how it is that the people who tried it before didn’t succeed, and when we hear this, it brings together, the part that is fragmented off and terrified with the part of us that can do it, and the parts of us that wants it and where these wonderful things really are in us but as potentials, and the coming together of all these parts lifts us up to a new height and our heads actually do swell, and it is a huge reassurance.

It is also a good way to apprehend our family history, both from our fathers side and our mothers side of the family, because in these histories are the treasures that we have inherited and are thus deposited in our unconscious, because regardless of how history might have been re-written by living ancestors for their own individual and personal reasons, the Oriki which at the core doesn’t change from generation to generation contains the concrete truths.

Ann Ulanov (Female Ancestors of Christ) said, “If we know who our ancestors are, we can live in unbroken continuity with the past. That in turn grounds us in the present, protecting us against being blown this way and that by every new wind of religious fashion or political movement. Continuity roots in something beyond our own time and nourishes our sense of dignity and duty in living creatively with what tradition has bequeathed us. Just as we can entertain our different complexes imaginatively and thus protect ourselves against psychic splits and dissociations, so our culture in honoring our ancestors may connect what we were with what we are and may suggest what our children may become…”

She continues, “Looked at causally, a genealogy gives a vision of the originating source from which we can trace a line of development to our present life, to this day. Looked at prospectively, a genealogy enables us to ask what will be breaking in upon our present life from the future.”

For me, I have had my ‘head’ called by relatives, neighbors and friends for a lot of reasons, from my fathers side of the family, my mothers side, for being a twin, and for being a breech birth, yes there is a ‘call of the head’ for that too.

This is a verse from the ‘call of the head’ of my father’s side of the family, and like I said, it is poetry with many levels of interpretations and associations that if I were to begin to break it down, would take up about twenty pages:

“It is a house of wild horses,

A house where every herb is healing medicine,

In that house, they are so gentle that they are able to bring you a goat,

a meek sheep or a cockerel if you asked for it,

But if their household lion goes berserk, they are able to rein it in as well.

I only plucked one herb for my medicine but when I processed it,

I was able to get 200 healing medicine out of it.”

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Forgiveness: According to Nelson Mandela

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 16:45:00 +0000

I put Nelson Mandela up there amongst the gods, as a contemporary of Prometheus. “Civilization begins with a rebellion. Prometheus, one of the Titans, steals fire from the gods on mount Olympus and brings it as a gift to man, marking the birth of human culture. For this rebellion Zeus sentences him to be chained to Mount Caucasus where vultures consume his liver during the day and at night it grows back only to be again eaten away the next day. This is a tale of the agony of the creative individual, whose nightly rests only resuscitates him so that he can endure his agonies the next day. But note also that Prometheus is released from his sufferings only when an immortal renounces his immortality in Prometheus favor. This Chiron does. What a vivid affirmation of human life, one of the essential characteristics of which is that each one of us will some day die! It is saying: I willingly give up immortality to affirm humanity; I am willing to die in order to affirm human civilization.” Rollo May, Power and Innocence.

Mandela did steal ‘fire’ from the gods and gave it to the humans of the 20th century and as such he increased our level of consciousness in our dealings with one another regardless of the color of our skins and I know that race relations in the world since then has improved.

The history of South Africa has fascinated me since I was in secondary school and in the late 1970s there was a massive influx of black South African students into our schools, this was Nigeria’s way of helping the disenfranchised South African blacks. The five students that ended up in my school had left home, family and friends behind. At the time, I was still struggling with the feelings of abandonment from my parents who I felt had banished me to boarding school at the age of 12, but I still saw them about once a month, on vacations and holidays, I wondered how these students fared without seeing their parents for years and some of them swore never to return to apartheid South Africa.

But what baffled me the most about the whole situation and still continues to baffle me till today is the fact that these black South Africans were not citizens of their own country under the apartheid laws! So what’s their citizenship? They were in limbo, belonging to no land.

But they must belong somewhere, they are in this world on some land and yet they have no citizenship! What is citizenship? Does that mean they couldn’t get passports? No, they couldn’t and the girls who ended up in my school at the time came as citizens of the free and landlocked Lesotho and, Swaziland.

It reminds me of a stupid law that existed in Nigeria (and as since been scrapped) and which gave the police the power to arrest you if they didn’t like the looks of you, and that law was about ‘Wandering.’ So if you were taking a walk on Broad Street in Lagos, a policeman could just come up to you and arrest you and lock you up, “and what is my offense?” you ask. Answer: “You were arrested for wandering.”

This law will better be understood if taken in historical context, and that is back in the colonial days, the colonials and expatriates commandeered and lived in the choicest parts of the country, like on lakeshores, by the oceans, on the hills and other scenic parts, and if you a native was found walking around any of these places, it means that you were going there for one thing and one thing only, to upset these white people with the sight of your black skin, even though this is black Africa we are talking about.

This takes my mind to the famous saying attributed to Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya in the 1950: “When the missionaries arrived, Africans had the land and the missionaries the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes, they had the land and we had the Bible. Africans were told the Bible would deliver them into heaven. But they were not ‘saved’ from slavery. Since the bible spoke of slavery without condemning it, Christian missionaries argued sternly that Africans would in fact be better off as slaves than as African savages.”

And to this day, I cannot bring myself to watch movies like ‘Out of Africa,’ or ‘A Good Man in Africa,’ where the ‘white’ man is like the Holy Ghost descending to save Africans from themselves, and not to speak of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’

So, since my teens, I have followed the events in South Africa closely and like most people in the world rejoiced when Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and what a celebration we had in Nigeria at the time! Over ten of our most popular musicians released albums to mark the occasion and there were celebrations on our streets and individuals threw parties in their homes. We even had our famous ‘Aso Ebi,’ wax cotton fabrics with the faces of both Nelson and Winnie on them and I bought 2 yards of the fabric to make a dress for my toddler daughter at the time. Every African grew a foot taller in that year.

If Nelson Mandela never did anything more in his life after his prison term and securing freedom from apartheid for South Africans, if he had said, ‘I have been away from my family for over thirty years, I just want to spend the rest of my life in retirement and reacquaint myself with them, he would have done exceedingly well, but he didn’t rest on his oars and like he said in the concluding part of his prison memoirs Long Walk to Freedom: “When I walked out of prison that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made many missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom comes responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.”

And so he worked harder with other political groups and parties and was elected the first black president of South Africa.

But like he said, it was only a moment taken to rest, and then he shocked the whole world by setting up The Truth and Reconciliation Committee as a step in the healing of the country. And what this was about is that anyone who had abused, or oppressed or brutalized another person under the apartheid law could come up, confess to this and be given absolution. Why did he do this? He didn’t want his country to dissolve into a civil war as was speculated by the whole world where the now free and majority blacks after years of oppression and suppression and being herded as cattle in the shanty towns, beaten, imprisoned and killed under the apartheid laws not to speak of other daily injustices and humiliation would rise up and avenge all of these wrong doings on the minority Afrikaners.

I read reactions to this from a lot of writers and I struggled with them as they tried to come to terms with this. Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, in The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness: “The logic of “Truth and Reconciliation,” however, demands that the mind prepares itself for the spectacle of a “penitent” Pol Pot, freed, morally cleansed, at liberty to go about his business in a humanely restored milieu!”

“This risk free parade of villains, calmly—and occasionally with ill-concealed relish—recounting their roles in kidnappings, tortures, murders, and mutilation, at the end of which absolution is granted without penalty or forfeit, is either a lesson in human ennoblement, or a glorification of impunity.”

And, “Memory obviously rejects amnesia, but it remains amenable to closure that is, apparently, the ultimate goal of social strategies such as Truth and Reconciliation, and the Reparation Movement (for the enslavement of a continent). It is there that they find common ground even though the latter does entail, by contrast, a demand for restitution. Both seek the cathartic bliss, the healing that comes with closure.”

And one of his conclusions was, “The crimes that the African continent commits against her kind are of a dimension and, unfortunately, of a nature that appears to constantly provoke memories of the historic wrongs inflicted on that continent by others. There are moments when it almost appears as if there is a diabolic continuity (and inevitability?) to it all—that the conduct of latter-day (internal) slave runners is merely the stubborn precipitate of a yet unexpiated (my emphasis) past. The ancient slave stockades do not seem ever to have vanished; they appear more to have expanded, occupying indiscriminate spaces that often appear contingent with the national boundaries.” I wonder if this is what Nelson Mandela was trying to prevent in his country.

A lot of trauma was and still continues to be visited on the African continent and even kind-hearted and well-meaning people of the world still use Africa as their spitting pot, and I wonder if had every country in Africa on attaining their independence had set up a Truth and Reconciliation Committee, we would not we have continue to visit even worse atrocities on ourselves.

Has the Truth and Reconciliation committee in South Africa given both the blacks and the Afrikaans a means of catharsis and has prevented to a large extent internalization and identification with the oppressor? Has it helped in preventing South Africans blacks from identifying at the pole of victims and the Afrikaans identifying at the pole of the perpetrators?

Mandela did not underplay the effect of apartheid on his people; he gave it its due place in South African history: “The policy of apartheid created a deep and lasting wound in my country and my people. All of us will spend many years, if not generations, recovering from that profound hurt. But the decades of oppression and brutality had another, unintended effect, and that was that it produced the Oliver Thambos, the Walter Sisulus, the Chief Luthulis, the Yusuf Dadoos, the Bram Fischers, the Robert Sobukwes, of our time—men of such extraordinary courage, wisdom, and generosity that their like may never be known again. Perhaps it requires such depth of oppression to create such heights of character. My country is rich in the minerals and gems that lie beneath the soil, but I have always known that its greatest wealth is its people, finer and truer than the purest diamond.

It is from these comrades in the struggle that I learned the meaning of courage. Time and again, I have seen men and women risk and give their lives for an idea. I have seen men stand up to attacks and torture without breaking, showing a strength and resiliency that defies imagination. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. I felt fear myself more times than I can remember, but hid it behind a mask of boldness. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” As someone of African origin reading this, I want to be like the Thambos and the Sisulus, and I just don’t want to be an ordinary African woman anymore, I want to expand and widen my frame of identification.

Mandela began to show us his thought process leading up to the Reconciliation committee even while in prison: “I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur. Not only because of the great heroes that I have already cited but because of the courage of the ordinary men and women of my country. I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or of his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than it’s opposite. Even in the grimmest times in prison, when my comrade and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second, but it was enough to reassure me and keep me going. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.”

And he goes to say: “It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred; he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.”

On my part, I have come to realize that Forgiveness is a very active process indeed and one that you have to work really, really hard to get to, it is not for the faint at heart and it does not include Forgetting, and as a matter of fact, we must not forget at all.

But it was while watching the movie ‘Invictus’ produced by Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman that I came to fully understand and appreciate Mandela’s thought process. And in different parts of the movie as he gradually preached his message of forgiveness and not only did he defuse a potentially violent situation, he joined the whole country together and had them sublimate their intent not to forgive (and black aspiration), and whites fear of retaliation into Rugby, projecting their anger onto the opposing teams that they played.

Rollo May said “The joy of the discovery of one’s own thoughts is a truth that we rarely hear from anyone who hasn’t hammered it out on the anvil of years of solitude.” And Mandela had almost thirty years to hammer this out and the whole world is richer for it.

We Have All That We Need

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 21:05:00 +0000

I have been thinking of this quotation by Erich Fromm from his book, The Art of Loving, “The truly religious person if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or mother.

He has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God.

God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at an earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world of love, truth and justice.

He has faith in the “principles” which God represents; he thinks truth, lives love and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable in as much as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever fuller unfolding of human powers—as the only reality that matters, as the only object of ‘ultimate concern’ and, eventually, he does not speak about God—nor ever mention his name.

To love God, if he were going to use this word, would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which ‘God’ stands for in oneself.”

But as people we pray for this or that, concrete and material things, whereas what we should be praying for is the ability to be fully all of whom we were meant to be because we have all that we need. And in the faces of challenges, we should be praying for the strength to bear the challenges. We shouldn’t be praying for things to change to suit our purposes. This is hard, I know, but I think this is the way it’s supposed to be.

It’s in the same way that different rituals help us get to the next developmental stage or cross the thresholds of life into the next level where we are meant to be, but they are not rituals that take away what is coming, because then they would be making us regress but they encourage and support us as we move forward.

For example, with seasonal changes, there are rituals to help us get through the harsh winter months as in the holiday celebrations; they don’t make winter go away. We welcome the birth of the sun (from the Southern Hemisphere) in December with the winter solstice and it gives us hope that it is coming back though it doesn’t arrive fully till March or April but we have something to look forward to and this gets us through the cold Winter months. And different cultures have different holidays at this time of the year with the common theme that they are all Festival of Lights.

Challenges and disappointments will come with living a life and most of the time, things will not be to our liking, but we have in us things to compensate us for what we lack if only we are able to appreciate them.

What is really important is the ability to welcome and embrace and deal with whatever it is that comes our way. When we are challenged, of course we are frustrated and angry but it’s the part of us that feels special that this should not happen to us, its like we are above that, and people do say things like, “I am a good person and I have paid my dues but then bad things still happen to me.”

First of all who is a good person and who is a bad person, and who is making the judgment? The Judge in us makes this judgment and it is partial to us and wants only bliss and no pain. In my profession we call it the Ego, and it’s very short sighted with a very narrow range of vision and as such not very smart.

When people say “I am a good person and this should not happen to me,” it is an infantile way of thinking and it is full of entitlement and what we really mean is that “I am better than other people and I should have special favors all the time, and those bad things should happen to other mortals lesser than me.” and also it is a way for people to control other people, as in “I want you to be this way so that I wouldn’t have to feel the anxiety that I feel when I am around you.’

People disappoint us all the time and they betray us and this is because “Betrayal is loss of projected values (E.F. Edinger).” And what we have projected out there was ours to begin with, and the betrayal forces us to take them back into us and they enrich us on the long run.

Our children most of the time will not fulfill our ambitions or dreams for them. Some of us have been challenged by giving birth to children with deformities or other forms of chronic illnesses. What should we pray for in such a situation? For a Miracle so that they are changed back to what we would have wanted? This is what most of us do pray for.

Every person on the face of this earth has brought something unique to the world, something that has never before been seen in this world, but the tragedy is that most of us don’t realize what it is, and they remain in us as potentials, it is like we are forever pregnant without ever giving birth to the baby. R.L. Sharpe said “Isn’t it strange that princes and kings, and clowns that caper in sawdust rings, and common people like you and me are builders of eternity?

Each is given a bag of tools, a shapeless mass, a book of rules; and each must make –ere life is flown—a stumbling block or a steppingstone.”

And different aspects of life are expressed in each and every one of us. And when we come in contact with someone that we don’t feel comfortable with or we don’t like, that is an expression of life and of God in that person, we are uncomfortable because it is something that we (our ego) do not want to acknowledge as part of being in this world.

But the thing of it is that people who are different in the big ways that we label handicapped, or mentally ill or on the ‘edge’ of society are the ones who have brought the really significantly new things to the world. And History is full of these people and we have all benefited from their contributions. And if (as I am sure their parents had prayed and hoped for miracles to cure them back to what the society calls ‘Normal’), and had the miracle been granted, we would not have had the benefit of their contributions in our lives. “Civilization got his first flower from the rebel (Rollo May in Power and Innocence).”

There will always be outliers on the Bell curve of the world, that is the human condition.

So perhaps what we should be praying for are in the words of Etty Hillesum (1943) an inmate at Auschwitz during the Second World War, “Reality is something that one shoulders together with all the suffering that goes with it, and with all the difficulties. And as one shoulders them so one’s resilience grows stronger. But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. And if you destroyed the idea behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainspring and then you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world’s.

Oh God, to bear the suffering you have imposed on me and not just the suffering I have chosen.”

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Of Nests

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:50:00 +0000

I have been thinking a lot about nests in the past few months, and I know it’s because my youngest son Mobolaji is about to leave the nest and fly off to begin his life as an adult. I have been preparing for the day he would leave for the past 3 years when my older daughter, Segilola left for college, giving me a taste of what it would be like. But how prepared am I?

I have provided a nest for him and his sister, and I remember expecting him 18 years ago and actually nesting. We had just moved to the US and I was shopping for a crib and making blankets, and drapes for the windows and I had enjoyed every moment of it as I had enjoyed it when I was going to have his sister. In the years since, the three of us have made a home together, but now he is on his way out to begin a life in which eventually he will be making his own home too.

This makes me think of making homes for our young.

Our first summer in our current home, a good sized snake that had made its home in the shrubs by the garage would come out with the sun to warm up. Whenever it heard us, it would slither back into a hole by the side of the house. I freaked out, my neighbor assured me that it probably was not poisonous and it had come to lay eggs there, but in Nigeria I had seen a man die from snakebite.

I didn’t sleep that night. The next day was very sunny and warm, and I got into my car and patiently waited for the snake to come out. After about forty minutes of waiting, it slithered out and I ran over it with the car and took off for work.

About five years ago, I found a mouse in the basement and I called pest control immediately. They sent a talkative man who gave me a long lecture on the nesting habits of mice, and of raccoons in the attic too. “Because of their malleable skeletons they can get through very small cracks in the wall, and even by swimming against the currents and the suction of the water in the sump pump (that keeps the basement dry) to come in to the warmth of the house in the winter months to have their babies, so if you see one mouse, there are probably six or more, but the good news is that they leave the house in the summer months.”

I felt despair, because if they can swim against the suction in the sump pump, fighting them would be a losing battle. But by the following winter months, I was ready for them. I had gotten rid of all cardboard boxes and replaced all the containers in the basements and the garage with plastic tubs, and that was the end of mice coming to nest in the house in the cold months. Though from time to time my maternal instincts wondered where they were now nesting, I didn’t volunteer my home.

Two springs ago, I thought that some kids were playing pranks on us because each time I went to the mail box to collect mail; there would be lots of twigs in it. I would clean them out and the next day they would be back in there. I was frustrated and didn’t know what to do. I thought of mounting a secret camera to catch the perpetrator. A week later, as I was on my daily walk in the neighborhood and I ran into our mail carrier as she was delivering mail, “Ms. Ayeni, hi,” she shouted across to me, “you need a new mailbox, a bird is trying to build a nest in your mailbox because it's old and it doesn’t close well. Birds do that in spring.” I felt simultaneously relieved and foolish, and though I didn’t get a new mailbox, we fixed the old one so that no bird could get inside it. I wondered where that bird who had been working so hard collecting those hundreds of twigs would now build her home for her babies.

Last summer, we discovered wasps, hundreds of them living in the basement, between the ceiling tiles and the floor board of the first floor. The Orkin man came to the rescue and said “they do that sometimes and there is nothing to do to prevent them from coming into the basement to build their nest. They are so small that they can come in through cracks in the wall that you can’t even see.”

Early this spring, on weekend mornings when I have tried to sleep late, some sophisticated sounding carpentry work of hammering and drilling close to my head on the wall would wake me up. Initially I thought that it was my neighbor doing some work by his garage, and with a lot of irritation, I would give up on sleeping till 9.00 am and begin the day.

This went on for weeks until my neighbor called to let me know that a bird had been drilling a hole into the wall of the house to build her nest. There was a hole in the central part of the wall about ten feet high. As I was thinking that the whole of the siding, lengthwise would have to be changed, the culprit flew out of the hole.

I thought of getting a ladder and climbing there to clean out her nest and stuff the hole with something metallic till I can get round to having it fixed but my son said, ‘Aww, then where would she have the babies? She isn't bothering us and we can't even see the hole unless we come to this part of the house which we don’t. Let’s just wait till fall to have it repaired. By then her chicks would have flown away.”

I looked at him and was proud that he was that compassionate.

These animals are lucky; they make their nests, have their babies, and in a matter of weeks the babies are gone and so are they until the next season. But we humans are not so lucky. It takes from eighteen to over twenty something years for us to mature enough to flee the nest. And after they flee, we the parents continue to carry them in our minds and to worry about them for the rest of our lives. It is the human condition.

Unlike those birds or mice, I won’t return next season to have other babies. I have to move on to other stages of my life. It is the death of something and the birth of another and I want to hope that I am looking forward to what is coming next for me.

My son has been helping me, preparing me for the day that he’s leaving for college, by weaning me off him. For the past year, when he comes home from school, he goes off to his room, to do homework or read, and comes down from time to time to visit the fridge, or take off and go visit one of his friends, sometimes having his meals with them. Whenever I pointed out that he hadn’t been watching TV with me like we used to do in the past, he would set a date over the weekend to watch our favorite movies with me. We both enjoy the James Bond and the Bourne series as well as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and watching these movies has been our "thing" to do together.

From time to time, he would ask me what I would do with myself when he leaves, and on his last day of high school, he did itemize the things that he would miss when he leaves home, like our time together in the kitchen in the mornings as I am seeing him off to school and my instructions to him that have become a standing joke between us.

I will say to him as he is closing the kitchen door behind him,

“Say hello to your teachers,”

He would reply, “I won’t.”

I will then say, “Don’t fight with other students.”

He would reply, “I will.”

How will I fare? I don’t know yet. But I am happy for him that he is excited about his new life. I am happy for him that he is a child that has always found life to be exciting and he has always jumped into life with all of his being, embracing every part of it.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore,
a host of online booksellers and
directly from the publisher
Genoa House.

What’s in a Name?

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:04:00 +0000

In my teens I spent hours fantasizing on the names that I would give to the countless number of children I was going to give birth to, and though I didn’t exactly do that, i.e. give birth to countless number of children, I still have a lot of names in my name bank. I take pride in the Yoruba culture of naming children, how in its original form we wait seven days before we give the child a name and it’s the oldest member of the extended family who has this honor. He or she has to meditate on the name, going into the family history that is hopefully in the vault of his psyche, and consulting with the ancestors.

The ceremony is a whole day event that begins at the crack of dawn with everyone arriving at 5.00am and sitting in a circle around a table laden with all the ingredients for the ceremony.

These are Water—the indispensable source of life. Salt – It is sweet in moderation but bitter in excess; that the baby’s life would not be full of bitterness, the kind that we bring upon ourselves by looking back on what could have been instead of moving forward. Honey—that a life of hard work like that of the busy bees yields honey. The hope is that the baby will grow to be a hard worker and a productive member of the community. Atare—these are little seeds, lots of them in a pod. And the prayer is that the child will grow up and be fertile, giving birth to millions of children. There are money, the currency of exchange, pen, symbolizing education that has the power to transport the child of a pauper to the president of a country, and kola-nut—for wisdom, and many other ingredients used for their symbolic meanings.

And as the patriarch or matriarch holding the baby in her arms take these items one by one and touching the baby’s lips or hand with them, she would say these prayers and then they are passed on to the people gathered around for them to add to the prayers as they too taste or touch these items. The names of the baby are then announced and they could be from six to ten.

This is the basic traditional naming ceremony but there are modern variations to it depending on the religious bent of the family. I love it in its entirety except that I want to name my child. Some patriarchs concur and listen to the parents’ suggestions but in some cases when parents wishes are not acknowledged, it has created animosity that rages on forever, such that the child could end up with three or more first names, each person calling him what they wanted to name him. Birth certificates have been altered, destroyed or lost and some family members have crossed lines and stolen privileges that belong to others, e.g. with the Oriki, the praise singing name, it’s an honor bestowed on the maternal grandmother to give such a name, but some paternal grandmother, either in a moment of sweet forgetfulness or because she just never gets the chance since she has given birth to all sons might co-opt that privilege. But for the most part, everyone calms down and accepts the names given to the new born with the hope and faith that the oldest member of the family and as befitting their age have commensurate amount of wisdom.

That tells us that our history do begin eons before we were born, and how deeply we believe that names are destiny, and Yoruba names are sometimes sentences and do tell stories about the circumstances of the birth of the individual, such that a total stranger on hearing your name knows some ten percent of your life story without having spoken to you at all.

Generic examples are Taiwo (first of a twin), Idowu (born after a set of twins), Iyabo (the first daughter born into the family after the death of a grandmother), Tokunbo (born in a foreign land), Bidemi (born while father was away), and Sipe (born after a tragic loss for the family).

Every parent on the face of the earth gives a lot of thoughts to their children’s names. There is the culture of e.g. Richard, Richard II, Richard III and etc. and there is the case of George Foreman recreating himself in all of his children, George I, II, III, IV… and a Georgina too.

Some friends told me they named their children after classmates they had liked, some just like the sound of the name; for some it is after a heroine in a book or a movie. I met a little boy in the 90s named Michael-Jordan, and an acquaintance’s son’s name is Mark-Anthony of Julius Caesar and not the singer, I was told. Someone named her daughter Herzegovina, “I was in labor with her and on the news they were talking about this place that was at war, I felt sorry for them, so I gave her the name.” Nelson Mandela said of his daughter’s name, “Zenani—what have you brought to the world? It is a poetic name that embodies a challenge, suggesting that one must contribute something to society. It is a name one does not simply possess, but has to live up to (Long Walk to Freedom).

We have a fantasy of a life that we want for our children as we name them, most of the time it’s with good intentions, but what about a name like Tequila? Now I have to ask which came first, is it Tequila the drink or Tequila the name? Who borrowed which from whom? I know an alcoholic woman named Tequila—be careful of the name you give your child. I am not making this up, what of a man named Rogue, a legitimate name because I asked him, and he’s in and out of prison. And I know a demanding young man named Demand. Oluwapemilerin (God has brought laughter into my life) is the name of a person I was in school with. I love that name and though we were not friends in school, 30 years later, we are now friends on Facebook. It’s a name I never forgot.

Some friends named Bimbo (Abimbola—I am born into wealth) on migrating to the US have had to shorten their names to Abey or Bim because when they had introduced themselves as Bimbo, Americans have asked them, “are you kidding?”

I’ve had fantasies of changing my name from Kehinde to what, Jezebel or Delilah? No, I don’t have the personality for either, but then I wondered if had I been given either of the names at the beginning of my life, would I have developed the personality to go with it? Yes, I would have, because then my parents would have raised me with that idea in mind and I would have complied with their fantasies, because that is what children do.

I have a problem with the name Kehinde. It is a name with deep and rich cultural meaning and there is a whole poetry on that name alone, but literarily it translates as the ‘last to come.” I wonder what it has done to my psyche and my expectations of myself. Have I come to see myself as the last to come and as such held myself back in many situations? More so growing up with siblings with names that are ‘The first to come,’ ‘A child for Royal adoration,’ ‘God loves me,’ Births in abundance’ and ‘Wealth in abundance.’

I read somewhere that we live our whole lives in the same way that we come into the world, unless we are conscious of it. Wow! I came into the world as the second of a twin that was unexpected (mother didn’t know she was pregnant with twins, there was no ultrasound in the early 1960s), so does it mean that not only am I not the first to come, I have also been inserting myself into places where I am not expected, or wanted, all of my life?

And to crown it all I was breech, coming into the world behind first and probably had to be coaxed out by the obstetrician with or without his forceps. Does that mean that I have been getting into situations back first, sneaking in (not expected) and shocking the hell out of everyone with “Wooh!!! Kehinde, we were not expecting that.” Actually, I have, I have always surprised the heck out of people who have underestimated me. So these things are truly powerful.

Once at the airport in Lagos, a custom officer who though was hitting me for a bribe didn’t want to disrespect me by calling me Kehinde (it is considered rude to address a stranger by their first name in our culture) so he called me Ejire (Literarily, ‘multitude of children,’ the other name for twins) and I rewarded him with a big smile and the bribe he asked for. I toyed with the idea of changing my first name to Ejire but there would be too many legal technicalities involved and I will have to re-educate a lot of people, so I settled with letting others call me Kehinde, but in my mind, I started to call myself Ejire.

The cornerstone of my profession as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst is in helping patients name things. That is why we ask (to the amusement of all), “How does that make you feel?’ “What do you mean by that?” “Try your best to put words on the way that you feel.” What we are trying to do is to conquer the terror of namelessness.

“What woke you drenching you in sweat?”
“I don’t know Doc, it was a nightmare.”
“Tell me what it was, what did you see?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember but it scared me shitless.”
Or, “Little John, why do you need the lights on at night, you are a big boy now?”
“There is something in the closet, and under my bed, I think they will eat me.”
“Little John, what’s its name, and what does it look like?”
“I don’t know, it’s a monster, it’s just a monster.”
Or, “Doc, I’m depressed.”
“Why are you depressed, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, you are the doctor, you figure it out.”
“Okay, but I can’t do it alone, tell me what’s going on with you, now that you are talking about depression, what comes to your mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Well, I think, maybe, I think I’m going to lose my job…”

Once on surgical rotation in medical school, we arrived in a patient’s room and there was a sick fishy odor that nauseated all of us. We tried not to be rude by showing the distress on our faces; after all, the patient is with himself and his odor 24 hours a day. The surgeon knew what we were going through, and he explained to us, “that is pseudomonas, it’s usually bluish green, it has to do with the refraction of light on the bacteria and it has a sick fishy odor. Now for the rest of your professional lives as doctors, and without needing laboratory tests, you will always recognize pseudomonas infection.”

Magically, it dispelled our anxiety and we were able to settle down and listen to the lecture. A terror has been given a name and it has lost his power. What is terror? It is something that has no name, and as long as it remains nameless is like an amoeba with pseudo-pods changing shapes every second and difficult to pin down, but give it a name and it takes a firm shape, and you can grasp it. “Do not succumb to panic, these are only phantoms of your own mind,” is an advice from The Tibetan book of the Dead, and Albert Camus said, “Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”

In fairy tales, a very common question is “what is your name?” I always encourage my patients to ask in their dreams and nightmares for the names of whatever it is that is trying to get their attention because that is really what dreams and nightmares are.

There, in a nutshell is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst’s weapon. We put names to terrors. Once we have put a name to them, they lose their poison and die. In technical terms, it is making a thing that is unconscious conscious and consciousness is shining light on dark things and light conquers the dark, all the time. Everything takes its rightful place and there is peace in the land.

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni-- ISBN 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

New York Times article on Genital Mutilation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 08 May 2010 05:29:00 +0000

Here's the link to an interesting New York Times article on Genital Mutilation.

If you've yet to read Kehinde Ayeni's Feasts of Phantoms, now's the time!

Feasts of Phantoms a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni -- ISBN 978-0981393926 Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from the Publisher Genoa House.

The Avenue to Love

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:16:00 +0000

Tons of stories, poems and songs have been written about it, and yet it still plagues us. What is love? How do we Love? Why don’t we Love? Who should we love? Who shouldn’t we love? What do women want? How do you make a man love you?

And there have been as many answers as there are questions. Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Men can’t love. Women only want you to serve them. Beauty will guarantee you love; fame will win it for you, it is money, no, the answer is just stay young, don’t grow up or old. Don’t be too smart, men don’t like smart women; be very controlling, women like men who are that way. Don’t show him or her that you care, he or she will take you for a sucker. The person who cares less is the one who has the upper hand in a love relationship.

Some have said that we are afraid of love. We do not fear love, we all want it, crave it, and are searching for it every minute of the day. I once read something where a man walks into a place of business and the receptionist asks, “Are you looking for someone sir? And the man responds “We are all always looking for someone.”

It is not love that we fear; it is intimacy that scares us like hell. What is intimacy? It is the ability to be open with another person, to let down our guards, to let ourselves be vulnerable. It is the ability to be able to look the other in the eye and hold his gaze with happiness.

Fear of intimacy is what makes us decide to take that call on our cell phone when we are having coffee or dinner with our friend, or just walking down the street with her. We are not with the person on the phone and we are not with the person right by us, we are not with anyone. It is fear of intimacy that makes us turn on the radio in the car rather than talk to our children, and it is what is actually behind that fight we started when the person that we care about was going away.

It is that same fear that makes us curb our enthusiasm and stops us from giving our neighbor all of our 32 watt smile when we see him, or from showing our co-worker that extra kindness, or hugging our daughter as if we would squeeze the life out of her, or telling our son ‘I love you’ at least twenty times in a day.

Most of my friends have dogs and their excitement when a guest arrives or leaves their house is simply priceless, dogs are built to love and they are not afraid of intimacy. They are the best teachers on the subject of love.

The Yorubas (Western Nigeria) have a proverb which translates to “It is pointless to hide your naked body from the person who will bury you when you die.” We are with the people that we love and who we want to love us, and yet we are afraid to let them see us as we really are. And this is the one big obstacle to loving. We want love but we are afraid to be vulnerable.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from the Publisher Genoa House.

Feasts of Phantoms According to Dr. Tony Marinho

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:12:00 +0000

A review by Dr. Tony Marinho, Educare Trust Fund, Ibadan Nigeria

Since I put the book down, I have been struggling with my emotions on what to tell you. Certainly, it is a well woven, monumental commentary on almost all things female, suffering and strength, solitude and solidarity, troubles and triumphs, survival and ceilings.

As a professional gynecologist who has dealt with these situations in the flesh, I was happy and sad, mixed emotions, to see the reality of the various complications of female genital mutilation and related conditions coming out in such a powerful manner.

You are a master of the art of weaving themes into characters and characters into disease entities. Apart from the obvious repitition--in dreams, soliloques, musings etc presumably for emphasis and from a psychiatrist's viewpoint, the book was a heart rending and heart warming account of female and male survival in a harsh local and international environment where no one is safe all the time.

Happily the light was at the end of the tunnel but what a long dark tunnel to have to struggle through for Ranti in particular. She really deserved to win in the end. A must read and a prize winner, I am sure.

Good luck.

Feasts of Phantoms by Kehinde Ayeni,
Also available directly from the publisher Genoa House and other booksellers.

Retelling Tragic Tales of Womanhood

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:18:00 +0000

A Review of Kehinde Ayeni’s Feasts of Phantoms
By Folorunsho Moshood
Publisher: Genoa House
Number of pages: 342

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) has been identified as the greatest act of brutality against womanhood everywhere. It kills the woman as a result of the excruciating pain, physical torture, psychological trauma and complications arising from it. One of the reasons put forward to justify FGM is that it is a device used in curbing promiscuity in women. FGM is the cutting of the external tip of the clitoris, which may create a hole in the vagina, leading to Vesico Vagina Fistula (VVF) or Vesico-rectal fistula (VRF) - the leakage of urine and feces through the vagina.

In some parts of Nigeria, this practice is done to celebrate the arrival of the girl-child into womanhood with funfair in a carnival-like atmosphere. In some instances, the woman dies right from the formative stage of the girl-child.

Kehinde Ayeni’s Feasts of Phantoms, written mostly in third person narrative educates the reader on FGM and its devastating effects on women. It also deals with rape, abortion, prostitution, polygamy, homosexuality and teenage pregnancy. These themes are woven around the tales of love, hatred, pleasure, pain, friendship, enmity, loyalty, betrayal, kindness, wickedness, life and death, thereby conceiving many antitheses simultaneously to create unthinkable events with strong elements of conflict, irony, tragic tension, suspenseful emotion and unexpectedness.

It is not an act of serendipity that the novel begins with the news of the death of two girls and ends with the birth of twins.The novel, which comprises forty-eight chapters, is divided into two parts – the past and the present. The past events are type-written by Ranti, the protagonist on her laptop as a strategy to get out of writer’s block, a stumbling block against packaging a proposal for funding on the effects of FGM. The present events comprise what Ranti and her friends are currently passing through. Though full of antitheses that bring to the fore contradictory creativity, the past and the present are not used as opposites; they are connected like ends of a circle that meet and become seamless.

The birth of Esho begins the gory tales of the past. Her mother, Wura, dies giving birth to her. At tender age, she flees Alebido Ekiti after killing her father, her first rapist. She arrives at a Convent in Ilesa and there, in the bush, she kills her second rapist, a mad man who impregnates her. The fear of losing her baby to the orphanage makes her flee Ilesa. She finds herself at the Oshun shrine in Oshogbo where she delivers her baby, Oshun named after the goddess. She flees the shrine with Oshun because her fertile body is needed in the service of the goddess- infertile men need to sleep with her to become fertile. From the shrine in Oshogbo to Iwo, the tale is similar. She works in a restaurant in Iwo where an old Imam approaches her for marriage. Due to the pressure from her Boss who wants her to marry the Imam, she flees Iwo strapping Oshun to her back. She arrives at Bere in Ibadan where she nurtures Oshun into a beautiful girl.

Since the ‘gods’ fail to protect her in all her trips, she becomes an existentialist who carries a knife about. In Bere, Oshun grows to become a nymphomaniac who starts dating men, especially Akanbi, as revenge against Esho for killing her father. Oshun’s waywardness produces two children – Lana, a boy and Iranti, a girl. But Akanbi, the father of the children rejects them setting the stage for a mortal conflict between him and Esho. The third pregnancy also Akanbi’s claims the life of Oshun who dies in her sleep at the age of twenty-one.

Throughout her childhood and school days, Ranti completely takes to heart the bad and good lessons drummed into her by Esho. Some of these lessons live with her as a medical doctor. Esho, driven by fear of what has become of women in her lineage, carries out FGM on her obedient granddaughter thereby killing the woman in her. All the women in her lineage have one thing in common; they are beautiful and so they are ‘playthings in the hands of men’. Ranti gets into many instances where she believes that ‘Esho treatment’ is the best for rapists.

Esho nearly changes her philosophy seeing the opposites in Ranti’s friends and their families, but she’s deeply rooted in existentialism and shuffles off the mortal coil in that spirit after killing Akanbi, the last tormentor of Ranti. The lessons from Esho, the brief brotherly care and educational encouragement from Lana, who dies of tetanus infection, and the kindness, loyalty and love from her friends- Moradeke, Gboye, Depo, Boris, Grant and Abe- equip Ranti for the battles of life wage by Akanbi, Sahara, Gen. Jamba, Jide, Tolu and Brian. Everywhere she goes, she wins. Her final victory against anxiety, depression and hallucination, which makes her a real woman, is crowned with the birth of twins named Wura and Esho by Depo, their father and her gay companion.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House

Review of Feasts of Phantoms

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:51:00 +0000

by Jean Panyard, Michigan Artists Review.

I have been granted a wonderful opportunity to review Feasts of Phantoms by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni, MD.

While I did not provide a review for her first Novel, Our Mothers' Sore Expectations, I did have the fortune to read it.

Feasts of Phatoms brings together Ayeni's passion, the study of the human spirit and the desire to out politcal and social injustices. While her first work Our Mothers' Sore Expectations focused on Nigerian political corruption and its effect on the cultural web that is Nigeria, Feasts of Phantoms examines the psycho-social aspect of genital mutilation through the character Iranti.

Iranti, which means Memory heightens the readers awareness to the layering psychological and physical damage experienced by its victims. Ayeni christens the main character with the strength and fortitude she will require to surmout traumas. Iranti plays the survivor, champion and nurturer as duly expected (and required) to create the vehicle for the author's examination of the horrors that are the outgrowth of genital mutilation.

It is a nod to Ayeni's medical expertise that her ability to relate the mutilation in clinical terms that keeps the reader from being overcome by the experiences. Because of the topic, and the physical complications and limitations placed on the heroine, Eros and other love relationships are given an opportunity to shine. The sister and familial love relationships are developed and examined, but most touching is Iranti's evolved love relationship with Depo, a beloved gay companion.

Ayeni delivers this quote mid-way through her most recent work, Feasts of Phantoms. "Even if a feeling has been made secret, even if it has vanished from memory, can it have disappeared altogether?" (Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones).

The quote which, in context, allows the central character, Iranti, to draw the corollaries between her personal experiences as a genital mutilation victim and as physician and savior while on the path to resolve her personal demons.

A review of this book cannot help but be complete without acknowledging Esho, Iranti's de facto mother. While a closing quote is used in the closing lines, it could easily have been used as a simile for Esho's life.

Feasts of Phantoms, her second work relating social and political issues in her native Nigeria, is welcomed and demonstrates her growth and mastery as a literary writer.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

What Fela Anikulapo-Kuti Taught Me

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 01:51:00 +0000

I’m not a biographer of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (1938-1997) or a music critic, but Fela was a constant feature in the landscape of my youth; I don’t remember a time that Fela and his music, or that the names Ransome-Kuti or Anikulapo-Kuti were not parts of my life.

He started his musical career with Koola Lobitas (1964-1968) and then ‘Fela and the Nigerian 70,’ followed by ‘Fela and the African 70’ and later as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and the Egypt 80.

My uncle was crazy about Fela’s music in the late 60s and ‘Alujoin join ku jon’ came to be my favorite, and even today, my psychoanalyst’s mind continues to try to make sense of the metaphor of that short story about animals.

Is it about our instincts, or is it about the undying loyalty of dogs? Is it about refusal to give up home and mother and emancipate oneself? In the song, there was a terrible famine in the land and every animal decided that they would kill and eat their mothers to stave off starvation, and in the meeting where this was decided, the dog agreed to the consensus, only for him to go and hide his mother in heaven, while the other animals killed and ate their mothers. And periodically, the dog would go visit his mother where he hid her in heaven.

That my mind would not rest on one interpretation to the song is because it is Proper Art— As Joseph Campbell said, “Proper art is of an esthetic object that renders wholeness, harmony and radiance. But art that excites desire for the object as a tangible object is pornography, because the relationship is not purely esthetic.” But, unfortunately those who didn’t want their children hanging around the Shrine, with all the activities of drug use culture saw Fela’s art and life as pornographic.

Fela was my hero as he was for a lot of people of my generation, and he was a celebrity that was accessible to everyone. He said it as it is. He stood up against oppressive authority as his mother, who dethroned an unjust king did before him.

Fela’s neologisms were quickly absorbed into the Yoruba language as well as the lingua franca of Nigeria, Pidgin English. Examples abound like ‘Zombie,’ ‘Suegbe,’ ‘Pako,’ ‘He miss road,’ ‘Monkey dey Work, Baboon dey Chop,’ ‘Jeun Koku,’ ‘Yellow Fever,’ ‘Shuferring and Smiling,’ ‘Opa fuka,’ amongst many others.

His music evolved over the years, from songs like Highlife; Omuti Tide; Ololufe Mi; Wadele, Wa Rohin; Laise Lairo; Wayo; My Lady Frustration; Viva Nigeria; Obe; Ako; Witchcraft; Lover; Funky horn; Eko; Gbagada, Gbagada, Gbogodo, Gbogodo, which celebrate the Yoruba culture, to playfulness as in ‘Open and Close,’ Jeyin, Jeyin,’ ‘Na Poi,’ and ‘Roforofo fight.’ Some were of simple advice as in “You No Go Die, Unless You wan Die,’ to songs of social commentaries about the absurdities in our culture, like Shuffering and Smiling (religious fanaticism); Lagos on Monday Morning (after our culture of heavy weekend partying); Yellow Fever (Skin lightening practice); Shakara Oloje (bluffing), to explicit and blatant anti corruption lyrics like ‘ITT,’ ‘Army Arrangement’ and ‘Authority Stealing’ directed at our dictator government.

Then came the destruction of his residence in an army raid authorized by the then Head of State Obasanjo, in which his house was burnt down, and his elderly mother was thrown out of an upstairs window. She broke her hips and eventually died from the injuries. Fela was nearly beaten to death, convicted and imprisoned.

On his release from prison, there was no holding him back. ‘Basket Mouth,’ ‘Beasts of No Nations,’ ‘Look and Laugh,’ ‘Coffin for Head of State’ and others came out of this experience for him.

It wasn’t until a year ago, twelve years after his death that I totally immersed myself in the music of Fela of my youth. I was listening to Boney M’s ‘He Was a Stepping Wolf’ with my son in the car and the beats brought back memories of Fela.

He was a great artist. He served music with integrity and all of his being. It is impossible to listen to Fela while sitting down; I feel the urge to march to orders while listening to ‘Zombie,’ and I must confess that I wish I could dance like his women used to dance. In my mind, I act out his songs because they are actually skits.

His style is for the beats to begin the songs, and then the Saxophone. This could go on for some 10 to 15 minutes before the lyrics finally arrive. Fela has very few songs that are under 5 minutes long, with over 95% of his songs being from 15minutes to over 30 minutes long. When you are listening to them, you know that it would be disrespectful to interrupt him by turning off your CD player, Zune or IPOD before the song ends.

And though I find him too chauvinistic in ‘Lady,’ his undying love of Lagos in ‘Eko Ile’ makes me homesick. I will not be as one sided as he is in his interpretation of African history and in his Afrocentricity. I have nothing to say about him marrying 29 women in one ceremony. But I am totally with him in all of his political and anti dictator ‘yapping’ and I absolutely adore ‘Beast of No Nations,’ ‘Coffin for Head of State’ and ‘Look and Laugh.’

But the one lesson that Fela has taught me in the past year is about Passion. It is the Raw Instinctual, Let Your Hair Down and Let It Rip Passion that a person should apply to every aspect of his/her life. Fela did. He ‘yapped’ it as his women danced it. And I have been able to master his ability to howl like a wolf.

He howled in a lot of his songs. “Mi ori iru eleyi ri o” and “egbami o” (I have never seen anything like this before in my life! and Save me, help me!),” with regards to the chaos that corruption has bred in Nigeria. And in the throes of some deep emotions, when words deserted him, he employed gibberish that still got the message across.

For a period of one month my favorite phrase was, “Yeparipa Egbami oh!” to the amusement of my children. It is a gut wrenching sound that comes from that well, deep, deep inside of you, from the depth that you didn’t even believe existed in you, and expresses emotions that there are no words for. Fela captured it perfectly in many of his songs.

While reading an article in New York Times about “Fela” the show running on Broadway at this time, the critic said that the play would reinforce the stereotype of Africans as people who loiter around and dance to music all day and that his wives were more like window dressing, I said to myself, “he missed it.” He missed the lesson in Passion that Fela was trying to impart to everyone, regardless of race. It is the passion that reconnects the body with the mind.

I thank Fela for this great lesson about life.

Feasts of Phantoms

a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni

-- ISBN 978-0981393926

Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Thoughts that Still Haunt Me

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:09:00 +0000

I think of them often: great things, small things, kind things and unkind things. I regret some of them, I am grateful for some of them, and with one of them I was lucky to be given a second chance.

On the list is the kindness of my twin brother’s friends when we were teenagers. They nicknamed me Daisy. They are still my good friends.

I remember my ex-husband’s “thank you for your love” to me at a time that I had provoked anger in him, and he meant it—he wasn’t being sarcastic.

I remember being on a bus in Lagos and going by Tejuoso Market. A woman was giving birth at the bus stop, and people had gathered around to watch, though they gave her a wide berth. I was already a doctor, and I felt that I should stop to assist, so I asked the driver to stop. He ignored me; he didn’t want to stop in the middle of the chaos. I didn’t insist. I let him make the decision for me.

I remember the kindness of a newly formed acquaintance. I was pregnant with my daughter and he told me that I was very beautiful. I don’t remember his name anymore.

I remember at another time during my short sojourn in Lagos in my mid 20s. I was late for work and on another bus, we rode by Obalende and a young man was throwing up by the side of the road. He was very sick and emaciated. I didn’t do a thing.

I remember being given a second chance to help someone. I had gone to Igbo-Ora (Nigeria) for my rotation in public health in medical school with my classmates for six weeks.

I think it was my second week in Igbo-Ora and for some reasons that for the life of me, I cannot remember now, I was walking on the main road in the village at about 7.30 in the morning, it was a time that the children were walking to school.

There was a boy who had been crippled by polio on both legs and he had a pair of crutches to help him walk. He was about 9 years old but he had the frame of a six year old. He had become an expert on the crutches and was able to keep up with most of his peers. But he had outgrown the crutches by about three years. So he crouched almost to the ground as he waddled along.

I wondered why his parents haven’t been changing the crutches as he had been growing. I didn’t think it would cost them much. All they needed was to ask a local carpenter, and he could easily have carved a pair for them. I walked slowly behind him, and thought of going to talk to his parents, to educate them about his needs. I wanted to ask him for his name and where he lived. I was sure that I could afford to pay for a pair of crutches for him out of my allowance. I thought of all these but did nothing, and it tormented me for many years.

Five years later, I returned to Igbo-Ora for eight weeks as a resident doctor in public health, and though the young crippled boy had come to be part of my memory of the city, I didn’t look for him. But one day, I went to the market to give health education to the women, I saw him! And unbelievably, he was still on those same crutches. His crippled legs were the same size but his trunk was growing normally and so he crouched more, and the years of crouching was giving him a bent back, not exactly a hunch back but close to it.

I went to speak with him. He had dropped out of elementary school and was panhandling. I offered him a new pair of crutches as I explained to him that he outgrew the ones he had 8 years ago. He shrugged dismissively. I wanted to take him to the carpenters we both could see across from us in the market, so they could measure him and get him the proper crutches, but he’d rather I give him the money and he would take care of it himself. I refused to give him the money and so I bribed him; I would pay for the crutches and give him money for food.

The day the crutches were ready and the carpenter gave them to him, he stood up as straight as he could, though the years of crouching had left their mark. I was very happy, and I thanked him for accepting my gift as I handed him the money for food.

The carpenter felt that he was the one that should be grateful to me, but he didn’t know the years of torment that I had endured and that my gratitude was for a second chance.

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Afraponafra Bside said of Feasts of Phantoms

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:01:00 +0000

"I'm reading Feasts of Phantoms and it has quickly become one of my favorite books!
Such good storytelling and the author really helps you learn about life, Nigeria, and what it takes to persevere in the face of huge challenges. Thank you so much for this wonderful book."

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

Our Mothers Engorged Breasts

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 00:04:00 +0000

For Nigeria.

Our mothers engorged breasts, painful and full of milk?
Who will nurse at our mother’s engorged breasts to relieve her of the chills of fever from children Murdered?
What drains there of, of our mother’s bosom?
Poison it is, pain it is, sorrow it is, milk it is not.
Our mother stood regal and for the world her breasts displayed,
Coverlet of dignity? Shame her cloak.
She killed her babies from the sourness of her arrogance filled wells. Of diamond and of Petroleum, of cocoa and of palm oil, palm kernel, ivory and ebony,
And her children enslaved at home and abroad. The treasures of her chest run to ruin.
The primal of womanhood, for country and for honor?
Iya is gold! Iya is anguish!

She swings her ripe taunting and the poison thereof,
Sprayed her children from the Delta rich in poverty to the Deserts very poor in hope.
We will milk our mother’s full harvest the children wailed
We will milk them and feed on them and they will be beauty.
And our mothers name? We will relieve her chilled, engorged and painful breasts and she must not char us.

I am from the Ibibio group and I will hold your hand my brother from the Kembi group and we will cross over to nurse together to help our mothers fevered peaks of glory, and she has to give joy.

My brother Birun, my brother Hiji, and you my brother Kentu, we hold the world up with the pride between our thighs, forget not.
My sister is Ibo and she bleeds red blood from her warm springs of fertility. I too bleed red blood from my warm spring of fertility.
Laughter of children comes through her passage and my passage.
I will hold my sister’s hand, that my sister Hausa, and my sister Gwari and my sister Yako, with my sister Bolewa, and together we will cross over to our mother’s fury from the pain of her sorely taut expectations.

We will feed at her promises only,
Poison we will refuse. Milk we will suckle.
Giggle of Kanuri, of Egede, and of Yoruba princesses,
Prowess of the Edo, of the Arago, and of the Kare-Kare princes,
We will demand milk from our mother’s store of solace.

Mother there is a heart behind the left breast we will entreat her,
A heart full of blood and the forces of life.
The right breast is for nurture; it is not decay or desecration.

I will call to my brothers and sisters. Do you know my sisters and brothers? I will tell you my sisters and brothers names. Do you know my sister and brothers Adarawa? Manga? Kanuri? Bede? Fulani? Dakakari? Dukawa? Jaba? Seyawa? Margi? Kamuku? Bakakari? Gbari? Kadara? Koro? Fali? Angas? Busa? Kaje? Mada? Nupe? Bubu? Dimmuk? Arago? Basa? Shuwa Arab? Batta? Mumuye? Junkun? Chamba? Mambilla? Tiv? Igala? Idoma? Iyala? Yako? Ekoi? Boki? Ijaw? Itsekiri? Urhobo? Edo? Igbira?

Do you know us? Does our mother know our names? The delirium from her engorged painful annihilation erased the memories of our names. We will go to her and mine milk form her springs.

They are beautiful, our mothers breasts. The pride of a nation.
Evil within sealed our mothers delight, fear within her aching breasts.
In the pretenses of her children is the envy, in the guise of those my brothers and sisters
With names earned from the depth of wrenching history,
The brothers and sisters whose names I know.
Mother gave birth to us in writhing terror, and we
Her children refused to nurse at her wealth.
Malice to go, it must, so milk can flow from mothers’ fountain of anticipations.
Despair in the ominous looks of lying helpers,
Hopelessness in masks of dancing deceit, identities in blaming music.

Mother finally spoke through her feverish parched lips.
Children must account, children mine you must make restitutions.
The milk will not flow until you expiate, only poison and pain and anguish and misery will erupt.

Children you engorge where you should share.
Children you bite when you should suckle.
Children you rape where you should cherish.
Children, with guns and swords and machete you come at me,
Not to cleanse, but to vanquish.
In toil, and humility, in labor with sickles, in sacrifices
With sweat, tears and blood, you must atone.
And she falls from her conceited stance. Accountability.
(Excerpt from ‘Our Mothers Sore Expectations’ by Kehinde Ayeni. Jay Street Publishers 2006)

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
-- ISBN 978-0981393926
Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.