A small people's world ( this planet)
Cornelius Hamelberg
A small people's world ( this planet)
Greetings from Janheinz Jahn !
When I was in Sierra Leone, I'm sure that I knew less than two hundred people there, but some I knew, very well.
Like a Muntu and Ubuntu man I don't just believe, I know that we live in a people world and that's why I don't have to apologise to or ask for forgiveness from anybody for e.g. sourcing some ideas, naming anybody and giving praise where it's due. As our late Ghanaian Brother Bedu Annan told me when we first discussed Kwame Anthony Appiah's first major splash “In My Father's House” - this was around the time Bedu was running a very popular Afro-Swedish nightclub in down-town Stockholm, known as “Maison Caliban” - and just a few more words about Bedu – he was a good friend of Buchi Emecheta, he was highly, literate and literary - a little like fearless fang”, Pa Ikhide, except that Bedu wrote less and on a one- to-one basis, talked much about literary and linguistic matters uninterruptedly and with both critical reserve and unending enthusiasm , most about the latest or some kind post-mortems, like a waterfall, like my son and I listening to Ginsberg reading his Plutonian Ode at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm sometime in January 1983, when I was home on leave before starting my second tour in the Niger Delta. Sadly, Bedu who I would fondly refer to as African Renaissance Man, was no longer with us when Buchi did her reading in Stockholm. I talked to Bedu on the phone the day before ( as the manic-depressive he then was , and I was one of the few people in touch with him then, he was full of plans about granting diplomas for his grounding courses and when I phoned him on the morning of the following day, too late, he did not answer the phone, It was the day on which he died
With reference to Appiah's book , “Thought”, said Bedu, “ is not necessarily racial”and we continued with some of the implications thereof. I demanded a microscope that would show the red blood corpuscles of the brain ( like race biology in Sweden some time ago showing the cranial capacities of the various races) . We did agree that certain thoughts emerge from certain geographical spaces - the places from which they were reported to have first appeared . We can even trace the lineage of some of the early Greek philosophers and the impact of Neoplatonist guys like Plotinus have had on Iranian Sufism - at least may the Almighty be pleased with him, my lovely Sufi Master Hazrat Hajj Sultan Hussein Tabandeh Reza Ali Shah wrote a commentary on Plotinus...
This world is really such a small world, the vastness of its its space in the universe of sound like a gob of spit in the seven seas, a lonely grain of sand in the Sahara desert. Materially speaking, even before we shed these bodies , leave our mortal remains behind, we could say something like these words attributed to Imam Ali (a.s ) in the Sermon of ash-Shaqshaqiya , speaking of how ephemeral this world is, “this world of yours is no better than the sneezing of a goat !” But whilst we are still blessed with life, we could discover the treasure hidden in our own hearts waiting to be discovered , said to be worth more than all the silver and gold we will have to leave behind us.
Just now we mourn ( some celebrate) the passing of literary icon V.S.Naipaul into the Valhalla loka of the literary heaven where luminaries such as the poetic prophets Walcott and Whitman confer. Meanwhile in my own life right now I'm taken back to when I started living in Sweden more permanently from 1971, when I had the good fortune to meet an ethnomusicologist by the name of Björn Ranung – put in touch with him by Lisbet Hejdebäck - who before passing on to the aforementioned loka was literary agent and Swedish editor of both Naipaul and Walcott - she ( a good friend of my Better Half) sent me some Swedish treasures ( seminal translations of Swedish poetry into English) whilst we were in Ghana , so talking about acculturation, I was acquainted with such ( albeit through translations) before I started living here, Today ( it's personal) although I love some of Robert Bly's and in some cases prefer W.H. Auden's translations, I would like to make tiny adjustments to the feel of some of those translations of e.g. Gunnar Ekelöf with whom I am most acquainted in the Swedish Language-
And so circa 1972 I came to listen to Björn Ranung's fieldwork collection from Nigeria ; Various, Idege Tribes - Music Of Dawn And Day ( more about all this elsewhere, about a time when Ranung was my cross-cultural therapist, medicine man and consultant, so to speak )
To Chidi Anthony Opara and the people who have been engaged in the still un-ended discussion of the Biafra War , just a few days ago ( downsizing my library, I came across a story by Ben Okri – one which I had been looking for, for some time now : it's his short story “ Laughter Beneath The Bridge” pages 211 – 229 of Firebird 4 - New writing from Britain and Ireland,”published in 1985
The story begins:
Those were long days as we lay pressed to the prickly grass waiting for the bombs to fall. The civil war broke out before mid-term and the boarding school emptied fast. Teachers disappeared ;the English headmaster was rumoured to have flown home; and the entire kitchen staff fled before the first planes went past overhead. At the first sign of trouble in the country parents appeared and secreted away their children. Three of us were left behind. WE all hope someone would turn up to collect us. We were silent most of the time-
Vultures showed up in the sky. They circled the school campus for a few days and then settled on the watch-night's shed. In the evenings we watched as first some religious maniacs roamed the empty school compound screaming about the end of the world; and then as a wild bunch of people from the city scattered through searching for those of the rebel tribe. They broke down doors and they looted the chapel of its icons, statuaries, and velvet drapes: they took the large vivid painting of the agony of Christ. In the evening we saw the first Irish priest riding furiously away from town on his Raleigh bicycle.. After he left ghosts flitted through the chapel and rattled the roof. One might have heard the altar fall. The next day we saw lizards nodding on the chapel walls.
We stayed in the dormitories. We rooted for food in the vegetable field. We stole the wine of tapsters at the foot of the palm trees. We broke into the kitchen and raided the store of baked beans, sardines, and stale bread. In the daytime we waited at the school gate , pressed to the grass, watching for our parents. Sometimes we went to town to forage. We talked about the bombings in the country whispered to us from the fields. One day , after having stolen bread from the only bakery open in town, we got to the dormitory and found the lizards there. They were under the double-decked beds and on the cupboards , in such great numbers , in such relaxed occupation, that we couldn't bear to sleep there any more. . All through the days we waited for the bombs to fall. And all through that time it was Monica I thought about,.,,