Blogsite of Kehinde Adeola Ayeni

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

I DREAMT OF MANY CHILDREN...
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 husband 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

Crossroads.
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.

Blogsite of Kehinde Adeola Ayeni: ORIKI

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 01:14:00 +0000

Blogsite of Kehinde Adeola Ayeni: ORIKI

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

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

Oriki is ‘The Call of the Head.’

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 00:52:00 +0000

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

http://africaworksgpz.com/2011/03/19/hidden-history-of-nigerian-brain-drain/

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.

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

Of Nests

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 978-0981393926Available your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers and directly from Genoa House.

What’s in a Name?

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

What’s in a Name?

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.

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

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/health/policy/07cuts.html

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 Genoa House.

The Avenue to Love

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

The Avenue to Love.

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 Genoa House.

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

Dr. Tony Marinho, Educare Trust Fund, Ibadan Nigeria wrote about FEASTS OF PHANTOMS:

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,
Available at www.genoahouse.com and other booksellers.

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

Retelling Tragic Tales of Womanhood By Folorunsho Moshood
A Review of Kehinde Ayeni’s Feasts of Phantoms
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.

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

Review of Feasts of Phantoms 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.

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

Thoughts that Still Haunt Me

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.

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

Afraponafra Bside said:

"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.

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

For Nigeria.

Our Mothers Engorged Breasts

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:19:00 +0000

What People Are Saying About FEASTS OF PHANTOMS:

Mary Ellen Clifford (Ann Arbor) on 1/5/10.
"I have just finished reading your novel, which I found very moving, thought provoking and hopeful about what the human can bear and recover from. Phantoms in the mind are surely alive in all of us.... I have passed it on to my sister. I have two sisters and I am sure they will both want to read it. I hope you continue your writing and that this novel gets a wide circulation! Thank you so much."

Linda Barrow Ikponmwosa on 1/21/10
"Feasts of Phantoms by Kehinde Ayeni is a brilliant book and a must read for everyone. The book caught my attention from the first page and was really hard putting it down. I enjoyed the lessons of life as told by the author and it truly was an eye opening experience for me reading about the lives of generations of women.... makes me want to do better things and achieve more. Thumps up."

"Kehinde Ayeni, I had such a wonderful experience reading your book Feasts of Phantoms. I especially enjoyed the Yoruba proverbs and how Iranti would relate them to her experiences. It's filled with such rich cultural inferences. You really did a great job.

"I am curious though, is this story about real experiences cause I was just blown away by the fact that Esho was raped by her own father... these stories are stuff we only hear about here in the US, I know about the female circumcision and the tons of young girls living in the north who have to live with these afflictions through no faults of theirs.

"However, I know that in our culture, folks do not speak up against such atrocities so they could well be happening but no one wants to talk or do anything about it. I went through different emotions reading the book, sometimes I would be close to tears and at other times smiling and grinning from ear to ear."

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:59:00 +0000

For the Very First Time.

The other day I was trying to describe what it was like for me when my daughter left for college to some acquaintances and one of them cut me off with, “Its empty nest syndrome. It happens to everyone.”

I felt robbed, and we all kept quiet because we had to find something else to talk about.

I know that from the dawn of humanity, people have been sending their children off to college or its equivalents, so my experience wasn’t unique but at the same time it was special to me because it was my experience, and it was my first time.

Why are we so eager to box things up, label them and dismiss them? I know that in some ways it allays our anxieties, and we hope it decreases the amount of the unknown that we have to contend with, in a world that constantly throws the unexpected at us.

But what is wrong with new experiences or re-experiencing the old as if it was new, seeing the same things through fresh eyes? Why couldn’t my acquaintance let me talk about what it was like for me to send my daughter off to college, why did she have to short circuit it and dismiss me?

It made me think of the times that I had seen things as if for the very first time, or see the same old things through fresh eyes.

When I turned 45 and tried to renew my driver’s license, I failed the reading part of the test because I had become short sighted. I spent my birthday morning at the optometrist and was fitted with my first pair of eyeglasses, driving home on that sunny summer day, everything looked bright and clear, especially the edges of the tiny leaves on the trees. Everything was so sharp!

Another time, I was leaving Sam’s Club and was behind a Chinese family with a four-year-old boy, his grandparents, his parents and a baby sister. The four year old saw himself in the security television and became very excited. He pointed to himself, jumped up and down with glee and made faces for the camera. His family joined in his joy, a part of it, which made the experience richer for him. I couldn’t help joining in and imagining what it must feel like to see yourself on a TV screen for the very first time.

Some twenty years ago, my 23 years old maid came from a remote village in Nigeria to work for me in Lagos. A week after she arrived we crossed the bridge to Lagos Island, and for the first time in her life she saw the lagoon. She howled, ‘Ewoooooooooooooooooooo.’ She was both stunned and amazed at the same time. And I too, though I had seen the lagoon and the ocean a zillion times, I was able to see it anew and for the first time through her eyes.

It was the feeling that I had when driving on Ohio turnpike, my first fall in a temperate climate in 1993 and the Appalachian mountain abloom with the changing colors of leaves looked like a giant bouquet of flowers to me. I had quoted aloud, “To wonder is to worship.”

This is the feeling I get each year at the first snow, and each spring at the budding leaves, blooming flowers and the colorful birds. It makes me want to take my camera with me when I go on my walks. It is also the feeling of the hot sun on my skin when summer returns.

I want to remove ‘seen that, been there, done that,’ from my language, because have we really? And I want to be able to welcome everything that comes my way with joy as if I am seeing it for the very first 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 Genoa House.

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:43:00 +0000

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.

PARANOIA

noreply@blogger.com (Kehinde Ayeni) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:02:00 +0000

I awoke on that snowy morning a year ago and opened my blind to see what the world had to offer. I could see the road, and to the right, some part of my neighbors’ lawn. There were tire marks on the snow-covered lawn and their mailbox lay shattered to pieces on the ground. A car had skidded onto their lawn and as the driver tried to regain control had made a sharp turn back onto the road. Was the driver drunk, or on his cell phone? Both are equally deadly and criminal.

I called my neighbor and she was thankful that it didn’t happen at a time that her children were playing in the snow. Me too, I was thankful that her children were safe and for more. I was thankful that it wasn’t my lawn.

No, I am not a heartless person and I do not wish ill on anyone, and I like these particular neighbors a lot, but I have good reasons for my thankfulness.

Had the driver lost control onto my lawn, I would have freaked out in a major way for these reasons. Two weeks before, as I was leaving for work, I saw a dead squirrel in the middle of the road in front of my house. These squirrels and chipmunks are either suicidal or their genetic mapping have not yet caught up with the technology of cars and roads that have invaded their habitat. So the dead squirrel lying on a road that belonged to the city wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I returned home from work and the dead squirrel was virtually on my front door. Someone picked it up and put it there.

I was furious, so I called my sister and the police. The officer informed me that the police do not remove dead animals and she was sure it was some high school pranksters. I politely told her that I was capable of removing the dead squirrel myself; I just wanted the incident documented.

A week later, someone angrily threw a metal signboard that weighed at least ten pounds onto my lawn. The sign was for an estate sale at someone else’s home, and I had seen this particular signboard at an intersection about half of a mile from my house. “Why would an idiot throw this board on my lawn as if it’s my job to clean up the neighborhood?” I wondered. As I attempted to take care of the board, I realized that the person was not so much an idiot as dyslexic. He or she was one of those people who mixed up their numbers. Let us say that my house number was XYZDE, the house number for the estate sale was XYDEZ.

I took both incidents very personally, especially that they happened within a week of one another, had months separated them, I wouldn’t have read much into them, but at the same time, I recognized how easy it was to become paranoid, and I didn’t want to feel vulnerable or paranoid. Those were my reasons for being thankful that morning, that one, my neighbors’ children were safe and secondly, that it wasn’t my lawn.

It is very easy to become paranoid or feel vulnerable. A lot of us of Nigerian origin or nationality are feeling vulnerable, ashamed, tainted, paranoid, marked, targeted and embarrassed at this time with AbdulMutallab’s attempt to blow up a NW plane with almost 300 people on board. I am as thankful as the rest of the world for this huge Christmas gift to all of us that he did not succeed.

It is horrifying to say the least and every mentally balanced citizen of this world must share at least one of these emotions, but we must remember that there are at least 150 million Nigerians in the world and we must not allow one person out of 150 million to throw us into a panic. If we let him do this to us, then he has succeeded in his attempt to terrorize the world, and we will be giving in to a coward.

AbdulMutallab did it. He is an individual and though we share the same nationality with him, it is his doing and not our doing, and it does not make any other Nigerian a terrorist.

Kehinde Adeola Ayeni, MD., a public health physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst was born in Nigeria. A mother of two children, she is private practice in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Her first novel Our Mother's Sore Expectations explored the plight of women under dictatorship government in Nigeria. Dr. Ayeni founded the Foundation for Indigenous Development and Advocacy (Foundida.org), a nonprofit organization whose goal is that every Nigerian child has at minimum an elementary school education, and she works closely with Educare Trust Fund based in Ibadan, Nigeria (Educaretrust1994.org)

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.

Press Release: Daughters and Well-Meaning Mothers

noreply@blogger.com (Genoa House) — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:55:00 +0000

Jan 1st, 2010

With Great Pleasure Genoa House announces the publication of

Feasts of Phantoms
a novel by Kehinde Adeola Ayeni
ISBN 978-0981393926

How is a well meaning mother to protect her daughter from a culture where the birth of a baby girl is met with despair because the only future open to her is that of sexual assault and teenage pregnancy, which would doom her to a life of illiteracy and poverty as it has doomed her lineage before her? Genital mutilation has many causes but at the root of all of them is fear. A fear that pushes a mother to do the unthinkable to a daughter that she loves? What does a scapegoat do with the fate she has been handed? Accept it and roll with it, or reject it? How is she to reject it when the acceptance of her role is needed for her culture's psychic equilibrium? In the theater of the mind where all springs forth, is there such a thing as an innocent victim, and a victimizer? 'Feasts of Phantoms' is a novel that explores of all of these questions, and much more.

Kehinde Adeola Ayeni, MD., a public health physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst was born in Nigeria. A mother of two children, she is private practice in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Her first novel Our Mother's Sore Expectations explored the plight of women under dictatorship government in Nigeria. Dr. Ayeni founded the Foundation for Indigenous Development and Advocacy (Foundida.org), a nonprofit organization whose goal is that every Nigerian child has at minimum an elementary school education, and she works closely with Educare Trust Fund based in Ibadan, Nigeria (Educaretrust1994.org)

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.

Media Contact: Patty Cabanas / Genoa House / +1-559-362-2086
genoahouse@gmail.com www.genoahouse.com