I have attended many book readings and what continues to excite me is the totally unpredictable consequences of opening up a book in public. At one reading in Oxford many years ago, we were halfway through a mildly modulated reading when a rather drunk gentleman interrupted with a swear word too indecent for me to repeat on this pages. ‘I came to hear some good poetry, not this G—damn s—t’ he yelled. And just like that, the reading was electrified. Our reader was mortified, yes, and so were his fans, but the room was fully galvanized, split between those who thought prose reading was rubbish and militant poetry fans. Nobody fell asleep thereafter. It was a most memorable reading. Indeed many weeks later I began to suspect that the author had planned the exciting intervention…

My Asaba launch was notable for the stories that came from my audience. I had just finished reading A Roman Job Offer, from the new book (a story about a man sending off his wife to Italy for a spot of prostitution) and one of my guests told the true story of his own sister who had just died of heartbreak. Her husband had tried to send her off (ala Roman Job Offer), and when that failed he had gone off himself – and after many years, remarried someone else. Then there was the Wing Commander who narrated his incredible life under the real Sani Abacha. Of course I cannot use any of these materials for my next story… too fantastic for fiction you see…

At other readings of The Ghost, I have not even opened the covers of the book when I am overtaken by peculiar and unpredictable consequences. – We have had venues chained, cancelled and have had to move place and time like a guerrilla operation… all in all I cannot wait to see what will happen at Brunei Suites.

Can you?

I was last at this venue a couple of years ago for a Chinua Achebe colloquium on a panel led by Dr. Mpalive Msiska. That was a properly sedate occasion. On that occasion I took a ‘Journey thorough the Names’ in Things Fall Apart. Good stuff. Today, we will under take a more contemporary journey, through the modern lives and loves that flower in the aftermath of a dictatorship – and exciting as the new book is (even if I say so myself…) the best fare will not come from me. It will come in the aftermath of reading, and perhaps in the interjections to the reading…

Look forward to receiving you this evening… and do bring your best anecdotes!

Return to Brunei: The London Launch of The Ghost of Sani Abacha. is a post from: Chuma

credit:http://www.business-travel-nigeria.com

(and you can take this how you will, but) these
double-breasted hills, bronze fields of
windblown corn, this scarpland
north of Udi Hills, these are
my mother’s
arms

& the mango groves abutting Aliade
may scrape the skies today, but
must remember too, our
sapling days when I
climbed them
one and
all

I eat my fill of her grove and go,
but next year’s mango
calls me back by
name

I hear your call, Shere. my dawn choir are
hoopoes, their three-note calls chorus
my name. susurrus rivers sing
their troth, with Kebbi’s
teenage hawkers
crying, buy
from
me

This land is mine. her gentle gravity
reins me home with every
step I take
away

Deploy title deeds and fences. bulldoze hills and ranges
into borrowpits, dam Sotuba, dam Markala, and
dam the Niger dead beyond the Jebba…
she still will flow to burst her
southern banks at
the River
Nun

See. how poetic rivers dodge the boulders on their way
to sea. so well they know the lie of land, like me.
they do this in their sleep: meander just as
fluently in the dead of night. – so iterate
in vain your politics of hate, but I will
criss-cross ‘borders’, clad by ‘foes’
that call me brother, fed by
the ministry of my
million sisters.
you will
see

Return your holy politics to her pew in
hell, for I church and mosque alike.
they may bow to gods on
every hill and stream.
they are my
brothers
still.

See me sail the Sokoto into Limpopo, cross
the Kaduna into Zambezi. drive the
Cape to Cairo highway, Juban
breakfast, lunch in Lome
and back in Addis to
watch Asaba’s
evening
stars

yet,
this land that crowns me son coops her eaglets with
hen chicks, pens her cubs with dogs, to raise a
pride of lions that shame their nature,
an aerie of eagles that won’t soar.
that scratch the dust to eat.
she scorns the startling
truth, she buys the
lies, she dies.
see…

so adumbrate this vision once again, of the
resurrection of my land, lazarused by
the fires of our future memory,
renewed by the wisdom
of your ancient
teaching

for my tongue is slaved to your peculiar kitchen:
knobs of ginger diced, sauteed in peanut
oil, still won’t sting enough
to feed pepper’s
nostalgia

Why is oha sweetest in Owerri’s pot? say.
why does Ijebu-Remo’s ikokore sing?
why is pounded yam best
eaten with egusi
fingers

Say why the aroma of smoked mudfish
cannot bewitch, till scooped from
Bussa’s rapids – & smoked
above her slow
woodfires.
say

Can you cook acha in Jos without the gingery gauta?
& still sing a song for pottaged grain? tell. or mine
her pot’s mysterious depths without a trembling
spoon? or see lodes of smoked fish, carrot,
periwinkle even – and stay indifferent?
tell! salivary glands convulse as
strips of ram, of lamb, drip
their sizzling fat on coal
aromatic with the
memory of last
night’s
suya

…until the affliction that eats memory’s roast
yam with bile for oil… Amnesiana Naija.
from the frigid floes in the
sky of a Pankshin
dawn I
fly

From the fragrant mounds of mangala,
in a market gravid with
tongues. Amnesia
Nigeriana!

Good mourning Nigeria

Reeling from the clap of percussive palms
echoing from independence, through
cenotaph; from the morgue of
Maitatsine to the
bombs of Boko
Haram

In the beginning you were sketched by trader’s
chalk on a map without a mother, by
moralists so sickened by the
sin of retail slavery that
they enslaved
nations of
men

Born investment, bastard child suckled by distant
queen, tired crone milked and cast aside…
until her paps are engorged anew by
oil…your kingdom comes: tin
gods that daily rape your
three dozen halves
of yellow
suns.
see

a seam of fortune in a sunken lodestone.
a picket fence hammered from
fractious sticks of dynamite.
a languid river and her
streams. – and a haul
of bled ethnicities
bursting at their
dreams

Kola lobes scatter into your gourd, miland,
portend a future of shackles -
that Young Nigeria
will break
asunder

Womb whose virgin seed engined the world
whose blood, admixt, loamed
the granary of
Earth

…Kola lobes scatter… but I read your
augury in the taut gaze of
souls pregnant with
dreams of the
amazing

A hundred years in sun and rain have steeped
your spirit into this: Naija. offspring

whose loyal lips have known no other breast
but yours – they now arise. they call your name.

Ojota flows, irresistible as
an ocean wave. Eko o ni baje

patriots from Jos, Jalingo close behind.
Kano’s pillars piles a driver into

the masquerade’s straw jaw. Ikot Ekpene,
team Lokoja, leading regattas of

zealous ones, secret Igbo towns strung out
on a brown chaplet of laterite roads

The Young Shall Grow decants them all. say. they
pool, they sow historic pain in truth, they

break the tribal lies of cunning foxes
sucking the marrow of their futures. they

grow a new Naija. from Mambilan heights
they flow, flood the Benue, drain the Donga,

Hadeija, all her timeless rivers pour
their blood into your cause, Naija. say!

they call your name, retrieving echoes from
ancestors, from progeny. from Ubiaja,

from Kpam, Ilorin, Abuja, they flood
the Tchad, float their rafts upon Anambra’s

brown currents, Oshun’s tumid skin. they tap
the earthy secrets of the Nok, Daura’s

implacable ardour, Oyo’s grace and
splendour, Kanem’s power. Bornu’s glory.

the squalid circumstances of their birth
is a detail quashed by the pomp and the

circumstance of their ancestry. Benin.
Bida. talakawa kingdoms where a

dozen chiefs lead hamlets of twelve homes. they
come. Potiskum, still nursing the scars from

the blood they bled via Badagry’s ancient wound.
their slave scabs itch. they’ll be slaves no more!

certificate of occupancy: signed,
sealed, delivered, this land is theirs to nurture.

she’s no asset on a corporate balance sheet,
no spoil of a rentier class. no raped lass.

and they are free, not serf. empowered, not
slave. listen: they strain at the leash of a

broken leadership. from Nok’s secret streams
they hear a voice deeper, a wisdom truer

than
their teachers’
alien dogma. yes. (and
you can say this if you will -)
this land is ours to have and to hold
onto this hour of her rebirth. she calls our name.

This Land is Mine is a post from: Chuma

It is 9th January 2012 and the General Strike is on. The Government of President Goodluck Jonathan insists on scraping the ‘Fuel Subsidy’ and the NLC leads a general strike to bring back the subsidy. The effects will not be clear for a few hours yet, for it is barely 2 am here. In a few hours though, in hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of homes, instead of dressing up to go to work, folks will be dressing up to march. Or sitting passively before televisions to watch such TV stations as are courageous enough to broadcast said marches.

At 5.30pm today (streets permitting)  my new collection of stories, The Ghost of Sani Abacha, will be presented at an event at Benizia Hotel, Asaba. This is an anthology of 26 stories asserted by an eponymous political tale. As a title, ‘The Ghost of Sani Abacha’ has caused my friends no end of worry. Are you sure you should be writing things like this? is a common question from people who had only my best interests at heart. – And then a few days ago a university that had previously agreed to host my launch pulled out. They had seen the title of the book. We don’t do political stuff, they said, you have to look for a ‘neutral venue’. Yet, all of life is political, and when the most able amongst us abandon the political, who do we leave it to?

Because I support the spirit of the strike I considered canceling the launch. Yet, it seems totally providential that the strike has been called on the same day that I had set for this presentation, months earlier. It seems to me that the Ghost of dead pharaohs continue to wield too strong an influence over our affairs today. It is not the power of the man, but the fear of that man that keeps an entire community in thrall to him.

Today, as we begin to exorcise the national demons that convert our elected servants into Pharaohs whose careers are dedicated to the building of personal monuments from the very commonwealth in their trust, I invite you to meet with me at 5.30pm today. Then you can open the pages of a book of stories on love and life – and a lot more besides the ghost of a dead dictator.

order from:   www.walahi.com

more information about other readings: The Website. 

The Ghost of Sani Abacha haunts Nigeria’s General Strike is a post from: Chuma

President Goodluck Jonathan, credit, ThisDay

I am taking a break from a petrol queue to write you this letter on the occasion of the removal of the subsidy on petroleum products. It is a tradition for us to shed our tears in private and to present ‘manly’ faces to the public, but there are pains that sap even the ability to pretend. There is grief that goes to the marrow. Your new year gift to your countrymen is one such.

Nigerians are past masters at making do. Long after it became logistically impossible to survive on our wages, we continued to win dubious recognition as the happiest people on Earth. Your government’s withdrawal of the fuel subsidy saps, at a stroke, our ability to manage an already unmanageable situation. It rips the bottom out of an economy that had already bottomed out. We are commuters without roads, barbers without shops, mama-puts with epileptic 1-kVA gensets, victims all, suddenly bushwhacked by the over 100% hike at the petrol pumps.

I have read your argument for the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy, and it makes good sense. Yet, have you really read our own argument? It is simple: we the people do not believe that the trillions liberated from the Fuel Subsidy will fare any better than the tens of trillions managed by successive governments, including yours. There are thousands of criminally abandoned projects on the books. We know that the list will simply grow longer with the Fuel Subsidy proceeds. There is a simple way to gain this president/people trust that is so critical to governance – within the next two years you can put in place a petroleum refining capacity equal or greater than our domestic demand. Once you do this, you will not need to remove the Fuel Subsidy. It would have disappeared.

So, rethink, President Goodluck.

It is clear that even the trillions liberated from the Fuel Subsidy will not save us. You challenged us to look around the world for a country with our level of fuel subsidy. We looked. What we found – embarrassingly enough – were governments with far less resources delivering far more to their people. Yes we had low fuel prices, but we were mostly our own water boards, power plants, and police authorities: we needed those prices to pump our own borehole water, to generate our own electricity, we the people who have to grade our own streets, to pay our own vigilantes and waste collectors – despite the politrickcians in our government houses up and down the land. Do look around, Mr. President. It is worse today than the halcyon days when you trekked barefoot to school. These days when our children do get to school there is not an education worth its name to acquire. As I write this, universities are on their permanent ASUU shutdown, which is occasionally interrupted by stints of lectures.

Rethink, President Goodluck.

Let us tell ourselves some truths. True, frustrating trillions flow past daily in the Oil Subsidy Stream, but the labourers lined up to fetch the subsidy are carrying baskets, not pots. This programme of yours will be ‘wetting the ground’, not slaking our thirst. Government has processed trillions of Naira without transforming our fortunes. We do not believe that another tranche will finally do the trick.

We are not fools, so we know that the ‘subsidy’ has to go sooner than later; but the speed and violence of this surgery will kill the patient. We want neither the bankruptcy of the spendthrift Greek government, nor the anarchic streets of the North African presidents-without-ears. You were not elected president to preside over the economic extirpation of your constituents. This operation is so radical that it requires anaesthesia; your SURE programme is good, but it does not begin to address the grief occasioned by your new year gift.

Slow down, Mr. President.

There is one foul subsidy though, that you can tackle with surgical dispatch. It is of course the Corruption Subsidy. Tackling the Corruption Subsidy has these main advantages:

1. You will be fighting WITH the people, rather than AGAINST the people.
2. You will liberate more Developmental funds, even, than the trillions in the Fuel Subsidy.
3. It is the single most transformational step, which will filter through every sector of our economic, social, cultural and political life.
4. It will cement your heroic place in our annals, and you will not even have to campaign for a second term.

Declare an honest war against the Corruption Subsidy today and the people will line up with you against the corrupt bureaucracy, legislature, judiciary and every other agency that opposes that vision. You will go down in history as a blessing not a curse.

Picture this parable of checkpoints, Mr. President: it is 2012 and a Nigerian pupil stands barefoot in his windowless, deskless, chalkless classroom. He waits for a barely-literate teacher who will not be coming today – because he is owed six months worth of salary arrears by the government. The only thing standing between this potential future president of Nigeria and his quality education are the hundreds of illegal checkpoints between the trillions of Naira in the education budget and his chairless classroom. How can a country that spent N1.4 trillion on education last year have so dysfunctional a system? Remove those checkpoints, President Goodluck. Scrap the Corruption Subsidy and we the people won’t even need your Fuel Subsidy. Scrap the Corruption Subsidy and you will go down in history as a blessing, not a curse.

So choose today who you fight for: the barefoot brigade who took you at your word and elected you, or the corrupt battalion who are even now ordering calculators with more zeroes for the contracts to come. Decide where you stand: will you man a corruption checkpoint, or are you shoulder-to-shoulder with we the dispossessed who elected a Jonathan to Judgement, only to find ourselves today, docked, and on trial for our life itself.

The war against corruption is not the unwinable, idealistic, lost cause that it is made out to be. Our proposed Corporate Corruption Bill provides a clear-sighted template to relegate Nigerian corruption to the museum of extinct monsters. Our proposal to liquidate or to expropriate the shareholding of principal actors of companies that indulge big-ticket corruption is radical, but no where near as radical, or anti-people, as your new year gift to your countrymen. A final word: the Nigerian leader of our dreams will send a battalion of soldiers into the desert in search of one lost Nigerian. He will not order battalions of armed men to run down defenceless citizens crying out to him.

It is decision time, Mr. President. Good luck.

Chuma Nwokolo

Dear President Jonathan is a post from: Chuma

This Psychiatric Hospital for the Violently Insane will be knocked down next week Maryam, because they are widening the expressway. Now we have to decide which patients to release and which patients to transfer to the medium security prison. That’s why we are doing this Patients Assessment. So you see this could be a bonanza for you. Or it could be a jail sentence. Just talk to me honestly, eh? Talk about yourself, what you did, why you are here, what you have learnt… just talk…

All my troubles started when my husband died, sir. People thought it was ordinary sadness that made me shave my head, but me myself I know what I know. We quarrelled that morning you see. I cursed him. It was just an ordinary mouth curse, you understand, the ‘you-nor-go-die-well’ type of curse that I have been cursing every time we quarrel for the ten years we married ourselves. Anyway in the afternoon they phoned me that he has die. Drop and quench. That’s what they said. So I punished myself. Maryam, I said to myself, you see your tongue now? From now to the day you quench, there’s no man again for you. So I continued like that, like that, wearing black for months and years. So it came to the day that that Magnus tried to romance me. He has been chancing me for long, you understand, from the very day that my husband died when he started buying orange juice for me, but as for me whose husband drop from the molue door and quenched, did I not have more to think about than who and who was pressing my body all over the place? Anyway, by the day I did the three years’ remembrance of the day the trailer crushed my husband after he fell from the molue, I was still very, very sad, but at least my eyes have cleared small, so he was talking about the football pools and about the premier league and the pension league and all whatnot, but I saw what he was doing straightaway! So he hugged me, he really hugged me… and when you want to hug a person you will hug her small and leave her, not so? But no. Magnus hugged and gummed to me as if he was drowning in River Niger and I‘m his lifeguard, and all I can think was: heuw! my poor husband has rottened very well inside his grave (because three years has passed by then) but look at this stupid man’s stick pressing against me! And some people have said that there’s nothing wrong with hugging a man who was so very, very sorry for you that he was coming two or three times a week with his packet of orange juice… (in fact, if you see the diarrhoea I was suffering that time. As if there’s nothing else that somebody can buy in supermarket than orange juice. And that’s the other thing: somebody will come to your house with one packet of orange juice and drink two bottles of beer before he goes…) I should concentrate on what happened after the hug? I slapped him, that’s what happened. Just a ordinary one-hand slap. What happened after that was also his fault, sir. Should a man who has been slapped by a woman he was pressing without permission not just say sorry and go? And if it was bad like that, should he not have gone to baf? But no, he was still hugging me and saying, it’s all right or something like that, when my body was telling me that no, it was not alright at all, that this was a big stick pressing against my stomach. So I head-butted him. You’re asking me where I learned to head-butt like that? Do I need to learn it? When he had pinned my hands to my side what am I to do again except to head-butt him? And I kneed him too, I can‘t lie to you sir. Me, I don’t know about the stick, but I broke his nose, that’s all I know. (I will say only what I saw with my two eyes.) So they called police and all whatnot, but my husband was a police sergeant and you know how they like to do espirit-the-crops for police widows? So the police refused to charge me to court. They said it was a domestic matter and all whatnot. So Magus called his brother – the one who retired last year as your medical director here. And they did their mago-mago long-leg and locked me up. That’s what they did. Fifteen years I’ve been living here… if me myself I think I’m crazy? Do you mean fifteen years ago or today? Well… you know me I’m Christian so I will tell the truth and let the Devil be ashamed. Yes I used to naked myself before-before, but that was because they didn’t let me wear black for my husband, when I have swear that it is black that I will be wearing till my dying day. They have now agreed – look at me now, is this not me wearing nice dress? I am not crazy anymore, I swear to God. Just because I’m scratching myself a little does not matter anything. If is you that has been drinking crazy-medicine and living with crazy people for fifteen years you will be scratching more than this, I’m telling you. If I will head-butt Magnus again? You mean if he brings orange juice tomorrow and tries to hug me again? God forbid, sir… you’re trying to catch me! Heh heh. Don’t worry, the mad-medicine has not crazed me like that! I can never head-butt him again, never! If you see the headache that pained me that day! I suffered it for more than one month! And if you see all the wahala I have suffered here for the last fifteen years because of common head-butt!
No, if he hugs me again I will just machete his stick for him.

Maryam, on Magnus is a post from: Chuma

On the second day you are still feeling bad, as is to be expected. It is a four-year-old marriage, is it not? One daughter, two London holidays, and a house already growing in the village? Fine, rage some more. Take the excuse of every word he says to dump on him. He deserves it, does he not? A man wants to stray and it is that ugly housegirl-type that his hands can reach. You could smell her from halfway down the bus, couldn’t you? And she fought like a wildcat too, practically stripped you naked during the fight at the Maryland bus park, didn’t she? Well let him have it then. Let your eyes flash and glint through all his apologies, break his I’msosorry champagne in front of him. Every fifteen minutes or so, hiss ominously. And if he so much as sets an apologetically seductive hand on you… well I don’t have to tell you what to do about that.

But this is the third day and you are not yet five years at this, are you? Fine, let me open all my mouth. You will notice from the party we threw last month that this is my fiftieth-year-anniversary – and my husband still holds my hand during our evening strolls. On the third day, my young, inexperienced sister, the world is not with you any longer. I am saying this of course from hard experience. His friends do not like you dwelling on the subject of extra-marital sex. Conversations about your husband’s activities after work always leads to their own activities after work, and if they are not careful, their own itineraries will end up under their wives’ microscopes. Your own girlfriends won’t like it either… remember they know all about you, and you’re not the senior sister of Jesus Christ, are you? You don’t want to provoke them into snide comments that your husband will pick up. Besides, all that extra sympathy you are bumming off their husbands… if you have matrimonial problems they will prefer that you don’t export it to their own homes. Nobody wants their husband to be holding and comforting another weeping woman for days on end, even if they are best of friends. Besides, all your married friends have horror tales of their own, and it is in bad taste to complain to a doctor about your pimple, when he is sitting on an elephantiasis of the scrotum.

In any case, my young sister, what did the green Cressida do to you? The third day is for toning down the rage, not ramping it up. So the housegirl type had the effontery to text him to ask if she forgot her earrings inside the Cressida? So? Is that not the same Cressida that takes you to work every day? That does your daughter’s school runs? How does breaking its windshield improve your life? No my dear… the clever wife’s rage is entirely premeditated. Nothing is ever done in the heat of the moment. She goes through her house carefully, determining the casualities of his next misbehaviour. When I fly through my house breaking things I might look quite mad, but my eyes are very sharp I tell you. I remember one aquarium that I hated so much, but it was a gift from my mother-in-law, and you know how that breaks down… anyway it took three years before he gave me an excuse to break it. Poor fish. Anyway, nothing, nothing, will provoke me to raise my hand against my own car. Am I mad?

That’s the point you forgot, isn’t it? The car may be in his name but it belongs to you. Just like the plates and photographs and old suits… these are impressive and terrifying victims of your rage, but they don’t cost too much. There is a system to the madness of a wounded wife and no matter how many times your daughter comes between you and your husband, you take her carefully to the side before swinging the pestle again, don’t you? So why did you smash up the Cressida? Are you mad?

(By the way, I don’t know who suggested the pestle to you, but it is a very bad idea. You are putting ideas into his head. An angry woman can swing a pestle around for show but the angry man will throw the whole mortar.  After all you are not the sister of Jesus Christ. One day you will make a mistake yourself and all he has to do is throw it once and you’re dead.)

Listen, three days is about all a man will take before he goes on the offensive. I told you I am speaking from solid experience, did I not? The first day his adultery comes to light, he is too embarrassed for words. On this day you can tear an old suit or two and he will still be begging you. On the second day you can still use him to wipe your boots. If he dares ask for dinner he can expect to hear the shattering of china in the kitchen. All that is par for the course. But when you go breaking his windshield on the third day, of course he’s going to pull out that email between you and Johnson at the Kano office. You didn’t think he knew, did you? I winkled it out of him yesterday because of my way with gossip, but he’s going to hit you on the head with it tonight. You just wait and see. He’s known about the emails for the last eight months, you know. You and I could never sleep on bombshells like that, but men are not like us. They can keep gunpowder dry for months and months, waiting for the strategic moment to detonate it… and a broken windsheild on day three is a strategic moment, you take it from me.

Don’t cry yet… if you will take the advice of an old woman. He will soon be back from the gym, don’t pose in front of the smashed car as you planned, with the text message on his forgotten phone in your hand. You must play it more intelligently. Once he comes in, you are to start crying immediately. He will be shocked and speechless – you only normally cry to manipulate your witnesses, don’t you? He will approach guardedly, ready to bolt at the first sign of aggression, but you must rise without the pestle. You must fall on him, incoherent with tears. Then, as he comforts you, you are to take him out to the garage and confess to the windshield you broke while hot on the heels of a rat. I know it is illogical and stupid and all, this rat story, but you are wet with remorseful tears in the arms of your husband and take it from me, logic will play no part in what happens next. He will have noted the forty or fifty thousand naira that will be leaving his account soon to fix the car, but he will also have noticed that his days in the doghouse of adultery are over. That incrimminating email with Johnson will be far from his mind, I assure you. Instead your marriage is going to be in a stronger place tonight, than it was when his eyes were turned by the housegirl type. Especially if you have the guts to pour water on his gunpowder by confessing to the embarrassing emails at the climactic moment tonight. That, my dear, will be your coup de grace.

Which brings me to the end of my letter, and to those silly emails to and from Mr. Johnson. What’s the matter with you, child? Where do you find the time to write love mails like that to another man? So what exactly was your husband supposed to be doing while you were spending all that time messing with the mind of another man? If you leave your green Cressida running with no one behind the wheel, don’t you know that some smart housegirl is going to take it out on a spin? Frankly, you’re lucky it was only one housegirl; grandmothers like me like to indulge the occasional joyride, you know. (Look, that was just a joke, okay?) Fine, so nothing physical happened with Johnson and all that, yes, yes… but let me tell you, you’re wasting a very valuable resource. It is madness to spend your emotional energy on other men. Where’s the pay off? Pour everything into your husband! The truth is that men are emotionally lazy. Text him, sext him, mail him two or three love notes a week… hit him with all that love energy and he will be crippled, too exhausted for the mental triangulation necessary to get it on with your housegirl co-wife. You can take this to the bank… I’m drawing on fifty years of hard-earned experience here. I have to stop here: it’s time for our evening stroll. The good thing is, they all get tired eventually. One stroll to Cement Busstop and back and that’s my tiger’s straying done for the day.

Heh heh.

Letter to a Young Wife, from an Old is a post from: Chuma

Truthangel rose in a towering rage, ‘You chochop off the hand of the thief in truth, but wherefore the sentencing hand? Wherefore the witnessing and the accusing hand? Wherefore this travesty, this hypocrisy, whereby the big thief sentences the small thief while other thieves applaud? Hear me therefore as I swear by all that is worthy and holy, that in one week I shall return on the fiat of the Most High and if you have not all served justice to the guilty, I, Truthangel shall search the hearts of the faithful, but instead of a fist I shall chochop off a head!’

So saying, Truthangel left in a flurry of robes and clouds of rage.

The incident sparked a revival in the emirate council of Zambaputu as outward holiness began to coincide with inner holiness. The realisation that an angel was on his way who would judge not just their words but their thoughts, who would listen not just to a witness of flesh-and-blood but interrogate also the witness of a guilty memory, weighed heavily on the faithful and people began to arrive in court, hauled in by their consciences.

But that week passed… and another… and another… and Truthangel did not return. That Sallah, as the people readied to celebrate the feast, word spread about the uncanny resemblance of a ramseller at Ruguba junction to Truthangel. A crowd quickly gathered around him. ‘Are you Truthangel?’ they asked, and he shook his head dumbly, trembling with fear. The resemblance was striking though, from the imperious nose to the angelic halo of hair.

‘Say “I shall chop off a head”,’ commanded the Khadi.

The ramseller (who as you have probably guessed, was also an amateur actor conscripted by Chuma Nwokolo to play the Truthangel) whispered the damning words.

‘Louder,’ roared the khadi.

‘I shall chochop off a head,’ stammered the ramseller miserably, whereupon the people of Zambaputu realised that they had been 419ed, and the crowd became a mob.

‘Seize him! Seize him!’ screamed the alkali, stretching a blunt and bandaged hand at the ramseller as he took to his heels, but – having submitted to the exacting justice of their consciences those past weeks – there were no hands left in that mob, indeed in the whole of Zambaputu emirate, to grab him with.

The Ramselling Truthangel of Zambaputu is a post from: Chuma

The Lagos dweller is a ‘Lagosian’, that is settled precedent. But who is the Abuja resident – an ‘Abujan’ or an ‘Abujite’?

Well, there I was in Maitama, Abuja, 6.30pm on Thursday evening for Infusion 20, and there were ten or twenty Abujans – or Abujites – inside the ambient JB Grill. Half of them were well-tailored waiters, the other half were seated at the very rear of the room. I was decidedly uneasy. From my fuzzy memory of my school days I know enough to fear that rebellious clique that gravitates to the rear of the class. How many times had they reduced my soft-spoken, diminutive  Sri Lankan (as she then was) teacher to tears with their anonymous cat-calls, and parallel conversations? This is afterall, Abuja, the uneasy capital of boko haram and we were two uncomfortable days away from Independence day. Read about Love, I tell myself; Chuma, read them tales about Love.

‘I told her so,’ worries Molara Wood, trying to soften me up for her questions.’ Too little promotion. Too short a notice. We’ll be lucky to get a dozen here tonight.’

But what do we know? Molara and I are Infusion virgins, attending for the very first time, but she was standing in for Dapo Oyewole and was due to interview me when the reading finally took off.  She had a point too: Lola Shoneyin had signed me up only a couple of days earlier when the really famous author stood her up. A snap storm had exploded suddenly over Maitama amusement park and although Molara had borrowed an umbrella, I am not sure if I would brave a thunderstorm to hear me read. It was looking like a washed-out evening all right. Only slightly better than the London reading in which I and my good friend who was billed to read with me (who shall remain nameless to save his blushes) had out-numbered our audience of 1.

Then Nwakaego and Aisha come in, the one before the rain, the other rather, wet but still smiling, and they preferred to stand until their regular front seats were set up. From them I gathered that regular Infusers have their ‘regular’ seats. The back-benchers are not rebels… they are merely comfort-hogs, prefering the plusher cushions at the rear of the restuarant.

7ish and the rain gives up. Lola Shoneyin calls the house to order. It is standing room only and even the bar stools are taken – Ken Wiwa and Prof Soji holding down two for the night. Lola runs a tight house. You either relax and flow with her or you are flushed out. We might as well be  rascally children in her classroom. Except that her hand cracks the whip of supple innuendos that would send a minor crying to Mama. My first reading is on love. Kind of. Married Statements is a short from my forthcoming collection, The Ghost of Sani Abacha. It gets its first airing at Infusion and my audience is flattering with their applause. I think we will get on well together. The night proceeds from story to story. I read a couple of diary entries from Diaries. Calamity’s catastrophe gets another airing.  I rebel against Lola and toss in a poem. It does not send my audience to sleep, but I do not push my luck. Molara asks the most flattering questions. Her audience takes the cue. I don’t know about anyone else, but I am having a good time. Obemata’s question gives me another excuse to whip out a second poem. My African Lungfish broods aloud. Smooth, Chuma, smooth. I am successfully disguising the poet’s penchant to bore every available ear with his poetry.

Now and again Lola wrests the microphone from us to hard-sell Diaries of a Dead African. These poor Abujites – or Abujans – have paid N500 for the privilege of hearing me read the book, but it buys them no reprieve from her disarming sales-pitch. Yakubu comes at the end of the reading, and he buys the last two copies. We are sold out. With 60 books sold, everyone in the room has probably bought a book (or two). Lola should be working in Sales. (Among other places)

The secret of a reading is that it is NOT about the reading. The reader can read a writer’s work more effectively in private. More cheaply too. The secret of a good reading is in the magic that is activated by the interaction of the writer and his audience. The canny writer will read his audience’s mood before he reads from his tome. His tone must be more alive than his pages. He must listen to the questions. He may have heard them 60 times before, but the reader in the audience is asking it for the first and only time. He must answer from the heart, and when there is no more blood in the heart, he must retire from the reading circuit. There is a mystery in the unpredictability of this magic, for the magic can produce gunpowder or chloroform… and nothing disheartens the reading writer as the sight of a dozing listener. There was plenty of gunpowder in JB Grill last night, thankfully not of the boko haram variety. I put a few more faces to my internet friends… Felix A. Obi…

My reading ends, and it turns out that this great audience may not have come to see me after all. Lola calls up Age, a guitar wielding singer who can still make a living as a male model if he loses his voice. Show-off impromptu composer too. ‘Tell me anything,’ he challenges his audience, ‘and I’ll make a song of it.’ So they do. And he does. He is not done, and he barges into the audience seducing other men’s girlfriends to their feet and dancing with them with only a guitar between them. Great, innocent, abujasque fun.

The Ghost of Sani Abacha will take a more substantial form very soon and Unu’s grill – which attracts the coolest Abujans – or Abujites – on the last Thursday of every month – is certainly one of the places it will haunt.

Note to Self: sign up Age for a finale. 

Infusion 20 & The Mystery of the Good Reading is a post from: Chuma

If you are in Abuja tonight you could do worse than visit JB’s Bar and Grill, Maitama Amusement Park, Maitama, at 6.30pm, where I will be reading from Diaries of a Dead African, as well as from my soon-to-be-released, The Ghost of Sani Abacha. Not sure what poetry I will be reading – but I will take a couple of requests…

Occasion? Infusion’s monthly gig, hosted by Lola Shoneyin & Dapo Oyewole. Here is their mission statement pulled from their facebook page:

Bring together readings by established or budding authors and poets, floetic music, humour, drama, eclectic art and unpredictable performances on a Thursday night… and you have Infusion. 

Infusion is a regular evening of book readings, music, stand up comedy, open mic poetry and poetry slams, with an artistic ambience. Infusion events take place on the last Thursday of the month, bringing together all lovers of art, literature, music and entertainment. 

Hosted in the charming environs of JB’s Grill in Maitama Amusement Park, Abuja, you get to try out the exclusive Infusion Cocktail, the Infusion Platter and Infusion Cupcakes for your culinary delight. 

Infusion, as the word denotes, seeks to inject a new artistic pulse into the Abuja social diary. A place to wine, dine and enjoy good poetry, art, music and literature. 

On this 20th outing of Infusion (when I have lots of stuff on my mind) I get to see things for myself. Join us if you are a taxi-ride away.

Reading in Abuja is a post from: Chuma

A very short post, this.

The Biblical story can be economically related: Abraham goes up the mountain with his son Isaac. He is under instructions by God to sacrifice the precious child. ‘I see the fire, I see the wood, Pa,’ says the perceptive son, ‘but where’s the lamb for the burnt offering?’

‘God will provide,’ says Abraham.

On the mountain of Moriah, Abraham ties up his son. This is a supreme moment of sacrifice for him, for he loves his son dearly. But God has to know where He stands in Abraham’s scheme of love. He is about to kill Isaac when the angel stops him in the nick of time. Abraham has passed the test. A ram caught by the horns in a nearby bush is substituted and all is well between father and son.

I have often wondered about that father/son relationship, following that harrowing mountaintop experience. If Isaac was a spoilt child before, he would have woken up to the harsh realisation of his position in his father’s priorities: a distant second place to God. Did Isaac lie awake on some nights, listening for the sharpening of a machete? Did he ever wonder how good his father’s hearing was, and how good his interpretation of the word of God? Did that experience provoke in him a desire to get on first name terms with God Himself, the better to say on subsequent trials ‘… um, Pa, I think that’s an angel calling… I can hear God for myself…’

The Father-Son compact is much on my mind these days. On many fronts it seems to me that our generation is changing the benign landscape not just of our lives but the lives of unborn generations. The young people of today seem to follow too docilely after ‘Abrahamic’ fathers who totter along, not under the influence of a benign God, but in an alcoholic daze, in a Mammonic stupor, stunned by the lure of the flesh and dragged in sewers by demons of greed. The young people do not hanker to know their constitutions for themselves, to test their reins. On the inspiration of the European wars, Wilfred Owen, rewrote the ending of the Biblical story in his iconic poem, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.

…an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

The times have not changed much since Owen’s days. We live in times where patriarchs ensconce themselves in harems, ministered to by nubile wives and mistresses while they send young, idiotic suicide bombs into market places in search of 72 virgins in the heavenlies. Times when commanders in chief send men to war as though the dead and dying were cattle, rather than sons of grieving parents. Times when our leaders do not bleed for those of us that die under their watch. We have leaders who do not consider our children to be their concern. Who do not care that we starve, are ill, or are destitute. We have sons and daughters of the crooked wealthy who lack the introspection of a post-mountaintop Isaac. Who fail to see that even the children of a Ghadaffi are sacrificial lamb on the great pile of firewood being amassed for our collective destruction. Our youth have both the brains and the brawn. They have the vote, they have the skills, they have the visions. They have all it takes to take control of their societies. Yet, what is this nattering we hear constantly by the sheep enroute to the slaughter? ‘Where’s the ram, Papa?’ ‘Where’s the ram?’

And what do the leaders say, as they sharpen their machetes? ‘God will provide, my son,’ they say, licking their lascivious chops, ‘On the mountain of the Lord, He will provide.’

 (note: the hard-working family in my photograph are victims too…
the dialogue occurs only in the writer’s imagination! )

Sacrificing the Next Generation; Lessons from Abraham is a post from: Chuma