Eugene Skeef : Secret of Beauty ( poem)
Cornelius Hamelberg
Music and poetry
poetry and music
there’s the indestructible beat of Soweto
there’s Kippie Moeketsi
there’s all that jazz
there’s all that poetry
songsters and rappers
are many
there’s Mzwakhe Mbuli
I’m a fan. Just one.
Can one ( any one ) say that about a poet or poetry or is fan and fan-ship only for rock star artists who usually have a LARGE following as in
“Might be a rock 'n' roll addict prancing on the stage
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage
You may be a businessman or some high-degree thief
They may call you doctor or they may call you chief”
Of this my man , I’m a fan
Eugene Skeef ::: Poems
(and this is to the swine : Please remember, GOD loves Robert Gabriel Mugabe
currently at ease with all the other glorious ancestors in the hall of fame in Valhalla - and -
little worm mutha-f-ker - no matter whatever hole or hovel you may be hiding in at the moment, if you don’t believe me just ask Bishop Desmond Tutu where he thinks he is and keep this in your mind as you read on : God don’t like ugly
Eugene Skeef : Secret of Beauty
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10162352875611131&set=a.58985416130
Dr. Oohay
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/7c24eeb8-6a75-462d-b9a8-7dcdd8d0868fn%40googlegroups.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Too bad, we just lost Roy Ayers , eternally resting in power with our musical ancestors.
I last saw him performing at Ronnie Scott's in 1999. Chatted with him during the interval
Nigeria will always remember him through Roy Ayers with Fela Kuti : 2,000 Blacks
My son Nathan Hamelberg paid some tributes to him on Facebook, three days ago
For Dr.Oohay 👍
From Phillip Dornbusch's Projektor : Re/construct
In Art We trust ( feat. Juju Rogers )
the lyrics 👍 https://phillipdornbusch.bandcamp.com/track/in-art-we-trust-feat-juju-rogers
“Porch boy with a short story
In the name of Oury Jalloh and of George Floyd
Public enemy
Too many never seen serenity
Cause your skin is made with melanin
Say their names, say their names this ain’t Destiny’s Child
A love song yes indeed and we sing it so proud
But that singing ain’t enough nomo
Strange fruit, Willy Lynch,
Uncle Sam isn’t your fucking bro!
So in Art we Trust
Rebel and not adjust
Carry on tradition, listen
won’t ponder much
cause
Whatever happens to me on this mission
I want you to remember my position.
That’s LIFE!
Cause I’m so tired of these lines of death
I hear the cry for breath
Every time I try to rest!
Inside my chest
I feel a mix of pain and rage
Who thought we still be fucking fighting in this day in age
Amazing grace
Too much praying we ain’t here for that
More like the modern day Black Panthers no more fear in fact
No weapon formed against me shall prosper. I'm a righteous revolutionary Rasta Ya Basta!
Transatlantic?
Damn that’s savage!
Man, that’s average!
No humanity!
Insanity!
Two so called “world wars”
Two time genocide
- That’s Vanity!
Invaded not invited.
Take it from us and rewrite it,
Cite it, sell it
N sell it again that’s how you like it.
Institutional / systemic.
White man’s pandemic.
Now don’t you think it’s an American invention
Killed Oury Jalloh and Warsame in detention
right here in good old Germany
Two so called world wars
Two time genocide
- no morality!
In the words of the honorable chairman Fred Hampton: „Peace unto you if you’re willing to
fight for it!“
credits
from Re|construct, track released March 17, 2023
licenseall rights reserved
tagsTagsDr. Oohay
Dr. Oohay
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/108068292.1646434.1741540943738%40mail.yahoo.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dr Oohay,
First of all there are the classics.
A little later there’s Robert Burns, some of whose songs are still being sung.
There’s the whole of the English, American, Swedish, French, German, Spanish , Indian, Persian, etc corpus…. ( I wish we could also have a Yoruba, Hausa, pidgin-English etc corpus to boast of
When it comes to modern /contemporary poetry, there’s so much out there, of course, not including the Owerri motorcade stuff that my classmates used to scribble in Latin, in the garden of Eden, when we were in the 3rd grade in secondary school. It would be like sitting Dr. Sir Warrior next to Wes Montgomery , a completely different musical genre.
In the poetry that engages the mind, the five to ten senses, there's my man Derek Walcott his early predecessors, his great contemporaries, such as Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, there’s Edward Lear of course, and all these guys, the Nobel Prize Poets
Dr. Oohay,
Something absolutely terrible happened to me the other day.
I have whet your appetite, you want to hear about the disaster ?
I thought I’d surprise myself, take a dip into the unknown, like that
adventurous miscalculation in Umuahia : Full Immersion in which
The Assemblies of God pastor and his crew (same cult as Sarah
Palin) nearly drowned me in their river, as in Death by Water
Encouraged by the advertising blurb ( these publishers are out to sell
you know) and the plentiful encomiums and nice enticing (seductive)
rave reviews in the first few pages before the preface, I checked out
Alive at the End of the World, a slim volume of poetry by one Saeed Jones
The name itself suggested that the poet must be a Muslim which meant
that like Malcolm ( El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) he’d have so many revolutionary
tings to be saying about bombs exploding everywhere in Gaza, wiping out children.
hospitals, geriatric and maternity wards full of the elderly, the nursing mothers and
their babies.
I read the first few poems with some awed satisfaction and was wondering how come
I had not heard about this poet before and decided to check out from the always readily
available Google who promptly told me that I was now in the department of Queer Poetry
Only GOD knows how I felt the moment I understood this, God and an Eritrean Lady, Milka Solomon that I told about it. Mind you I’m not homophobic or any of that, although I was quite upset when I learned that the one you refer to as “ the beloved singer”, Al Green was actually gay but ah, what’s done cannot be undone, such as smooching with my lady, to his song. “ I’m still in love with you”
I’m not homophonic or any of that, certainly not, although once upon a time and this was in a real life situation, there I was sitting next to her on her student bed at Frescati, at the University of Stockholm, and as you know that “ God don’t like ugly” and there I was on Carol’s bed, Carol Johnson , beautiful-looking soul sister , a Captain in the US Army and Lesbian; the devil wasted no time in whispering in my ear, “ Cornelius, you’ve got to do this good deed : you’ve got to convert her - put your arms around her, tell her some sweet honey nothings about making love not war, tell her she doesn’t know what she’s been missing, make some real honey poetry with her”. But caution got the better of me, I remember how half an hour earlier she had manhandled 193 cm tall Tommy Powell who had merely greeted her, “ Hi Baby” - she had whip-lashed him with her tongue, so terribly, and so I deserted the idea of converting her just then. As Shakespeare said,
“Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.”
The only course I ever took on African Poetry was with Gerald Moore, in Ghana,
and he mostly talked about his favourite : Tchicaya U Tam'si
Everybody (including yours truly) can regurgitate a few lines Okigbo’s “ Heavensgate “
Everybody ( including me) has these few lines from Okigbo’s “The Passage” on their lips
“BEFORE YOU, my mother Idoto,
Naked I stand;
Before your weary presence,
A prodigal
Leaning on an oilbean,
Lost in your legend
Under your power wait I
On barefoot,
Watchman for the watchword
At Heavensgate;
Out of the depth my cry:
Give ear and hearken…”
Somehow, and I don’t know why, but according to my own memorization it’s
“Before your watery presence”
I suppose a “folkkär” poet / national poet/ icon has that kind of distinction that his fans can at least recite a few lines of his whatever - with Soyinka it’s probably Telephone Conversation, with John Pepper Clark it must be Ibadan , what could it be when it comes to Gabriel Okara ?
If indeed, “criticism is as inevitable as breathing” , then so is making comparisons / comparing ( as inevitable as breathing )
So, when it comes to volume, which of the Nigerian Poets are of the stature of Senghor, Aimé Césaire, any of the major North African or South African poets ?
Cornelius Ignoramus asketh because he doesn’t know. He knows not
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dr Oohay,
Apologies for the calumny, re - “ I was quite upset when I learned that the one you refer to as “ the beloved singer”, Al Green was actually gay but ah, what’s done cannot be undone, such as smooching with my lady, to his song. “ I’m still in love with you”
More properly said, I was quite upset when I HEARD on the grapevine ( not “learned”) that the one you refer to as “ the beloved singer”, Al Green was actually gay “ ( The first thing that I learned in the first philosophy class that I attended was the proposition that to say you know x, x must be true.
This is what they like to do (the miscreants ) they love to slander innocent people, to slander their chosen enemies. They usually slander famous people, presidents, etc even Brother Obama was not spared, nor was Malcolm in Manning Marable’s book “ Malcolm X - A Life of Reinvention”
In Al’s case we know
that in his earlier days
before he became a Gospel preacher
he was known as a womaniser
crooning ”Let's Stay Together”
Of course we may have our own phobias and personal preferences which do not necessarily diminish or augment our appreciation or depreciation of the many famous homosexual and lesbian poets , writers, playwrights, actors, artists, entertainers…
as the bard wrote about the motor park lout, “a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. “
About the poetry bug and those who wanna wear the cap of “ poet” by profession, ama thinking that T.S. Eliot was a banker, and about political commentary I'm thinking about e.g. W.H.Auden , about war, Wilfred Owen and other anti-war poets ( I occasionally listen to a several hours long recording of war poetry - most of it read in a declamatory manner) all of this this leading to a major question about your “favourite Naija poet”: Christopher Okigbo seems to be so inextricably linked to the Biafra War ( forgive me if I’m wrong, because , to date I’ve only read a bit of his “Heavensgate” ) - you say that he was far removed from identity politics “throughout his short life” - which leaves me wondering , since it was not a case of unarmed neutrality in his case, how did he wind up dying as a Biafran Major then , and more importantly, could he in any way be described as an anti-war Biafran poet ?
Talking about war and anti-war , with regard to Carol, back then wisdom dictated “ discretion is the better part of valour” - and indeed Islam was not spread by the sword either ( for those in doubt check out “The Sign Of The Sword”) and here too I must apologise and repent about such thoughts on this 11th day of Ramadan , but back then , for all I know, Carol had an AK47 stashed under her bed, maybe an Uzi in the wardrobe ( just in case) and non-aggressor that I am, I was not going to be the one to give her an opportunity to try some Krav Maga on yours truly .
Just look at the sorry case of Julian Assange who was accused of sexual assault in Sweden. In his case it probably all started because he was in Moody’s Mood, .Moody’s mood as the First Cause