by Chris Abani
2
A cubist way to see the world.
Fractured histories,
at once present and absent.
What is this stone tongue that won’t let me
make poetry in Igbo?
Akwa — egg
Akwa — cloth
Akwa — cry
Akwa — bed
Tone is God.
Akwa kwara akwa maka na akwa ya kuwara na akwa.
The cloth cried because its egg broke
on the hardness of the bed.
This is not avant-garde. This is Igbo.
Ehagi bu egu nagu irem.
Your name is a hunger on my tongue.
Enya gi bu ihe na echekwubem.
Your eyes are the light that shelters me.
Omoloma gi but omoloma’m.
Your beauty makes me beautiful.
I bu ndu na edubem.
You are my reason for living.
These words I learned tell me nothing:
faith, god, fire, man, death, sun, wind,
sea, sea, sea.
I learned dictator and it meant empty.
I learned fratricide.
I learned to hate and the world ground on.
In a bleak time, those who indulge are sybarites.
I am choosing a name for my lover.
Nganga — elegance.
Amara — grace.
Obi — heart.
Ngozi — blessing.
In the old country my mother planted flowers
in the face of my father’s disdain.
In every garden,
in every house,
no matter how long
we lived there.
I think it was the war,
the Blitz in England, that took all the flowers.
I think it was for the love she couldn’t show him.
I think it was for me.
To show me that only the unspeakable remains.
And remains as gesture.
Eden is not the thing we seek.
It is the thing we cannot find.
It hangs tremulous like a spider’s web from a branch.
This is the body of Christ.
Amen.
Histories
1
Boys are taught to kill early.
Five
when I shot a chick in my first ritual.
Eight
when chickens became easy.
Ten
when I killed a goat. I was made to stare
into that goat’s eyes before pulling
my knife across its throat.
Amen.
I thought it was to teach me the agony
of the kill. Perhaps it was
to inure me to blood.
To think nothing of the jagged resistance of flesh,
to make the smell of rust and metal and shit familiar.
I have never killed a man, but
I know how, I know I can,
I know that if the timing were right I would.
I am afraid that I might not feel sorry.
I am afraid that I will enjoy it.
2
Joyce and I share the ghosts of mothers
wandering the halls of our novels, calling
for a light that cannot fit there.
It is time for dinner.
Approximate a field tool shorn of wooden handle,
floating above a block of Plexiglas.
Or a comb caught in the transparent mount of a frame.
Everywhere I turn, Africa is dead.
They don’t care for our ecstatic, our desire,
they care nothing about us.
We are a dead people. All that matters is how close
we match, or approximate the exhibit.
And over here, Ladies and Gentlemen, beside
the Venus Hottentot, an example of twenty-first century African writing.
Note the use of proverbs, puns, and allusions.
Also the landscape of huts and pots curdling on hearths.
Even now angels stalk me in my fear.
One way to know you are in love is to feel
the incompleteness of yourself settle on you
like dust in an abandoned house.
Oh, to be Rilke and to be full of suicidal angels and no fear.
This is the razor’s edge.
In the desert, new cartographies are drawn by wind and desire.
Ask the Tuareg why they must and they say: We must.
I want to believe that living things can hear me.
I want trees to nod when I caress their bark,
to shiver in the delight of my touch.
A bird shat on my head. Does that count?
I have killed before. Felt the delight of blood.
The sticky way it coats everything
so that you can’t chase the flies from your eyes,
you cannot scratch the itch on your nose.
The way sweat stings reluctant tears.
There is little that will remind you of home more than
the sweet smell of fur singeing in the fire, singeing
as the goat turns slowly, too far to cook
but close enough to burn the fur,
and the knife scraping it off and it sounds
like when you scrape the sticky papaya seeds
from the cutting board, a miracle,
flesh turned wood, and your heart becomes
a stone harder than the mango pit your teeth scour
for one more taste of the sweet,
and it always comes back to that.
Killing begins with the story of land.
My land, and my father’s land and
his father’s land before him.
Amen.
3
What can you say about growing up in Nigeria?
Does anyone care that you picked plump red and yellow
cashews from trees and ate them in the sun,
the sticky-sweet of them running down your arms.
And later, the seeds collected and roasted for the nut.
And in prison, men writing names on bodies with the sap.
Names to obscure their real selves,
names to protect what might be left over
when they returned to the world from hell.
It is an old trick, to fool death by writing
a new name on your body.
I was afraid my soul would be obscured,
and in cowardly script, almost invisible to the eye,
scrawled with the tip of a needle: Saddam.
It has faded to a nice smudge on my belly,
where a network of hairs and stretch marks
pretend it never happened.
I learned alchemy in prison.
Words mean only what you want them to.
You say sunshine and you mean hope.
You say food and you mean refuge.
You say sand and you mean play.
You say stone and you mean, I will never forget.
But you do, but you do and thank God, thank God.
When they called from the university,
in all innocence, they said,
There is a letter for you from your president.
They had never heard the words Dele uttered
before that letter bomb exploded.
You tell your friend who runs the place.
And you sit turning the letter over and over,
while she gently clears the wing
and then comes back to sit with you as
you turn the letter over and over.
Fingers ignorantly searching for wires.
Over and over you turn wishing you were American
and could have the naïveté to not fear a letter from
your president. To feel only pride or the gentle rise
of acerbic wit as you prepare
to decline whatever is on offer.
You smile at your friend who has no reason
to be here except she won’t let you die alone
and you rip the envelope open.
There is no explosion.
A letter spills out with the crest of the president.
You are crying.
You are glad you are not dead.
You are glad that your country is proud of you.
You are glad to see the day when things can change.
You are confused.
Your friend is holding your hand.
Dear Eloise,
blessing be upon your name.
Is this what it feels like to have your father love you?
To not fear his return?
To not expect to be hit when he reaches for you?
What can it feel like to believe
that the world is inherently good?
Let there be love.
I am not a pessimist.
I believe in love.
It has, however, often been a foreign country to me.
This is the body of Christ.
Sanctificum.
4
When I was five,
I tried to fetch water from the unfinished septic tank
with a plastic teapot for my sister’s tea party.
I fell, the weakness of water-eroded wood giving beneath me.
What kind of son betrays his father like this?
As I emerged, I saw he was about to leap.
Maybe that was why he beat me so much.
Maybe it is too much for your father to believe
that he would give his life for you.
And who can blame him?
I wanted to be a son you could be proud of, Father.
I killed the way you taught me.
But I liked dolls and tea and playing with my sister.
Forgive me.
This is the body of man.
Sanctificum.
And then the war followed.
5
But it began in 1660.
Exploited by Portugal and Spain,
under a gentleman’s agreement, for slaves
important to the New World, Nigeria,
though unnamed, was ignored by a British Empire
too busy fighting for South Africa and India,
while putting out the fires
of rebellion in America.
But declining fortunes in India,
the need to curtail power of European rivals,
conspired with the Crown’s greed to needle
abolitionists to battle.
Wrenched from Spain and Portugal,
we are the prize,
rich in palm oil,
rich in camwood,
rich in gold,
rich in ivory.
Knitting on the upper deck of a steamer
headed north on the Niger, Lady Lugard,
the wife of Britain’s governor
for the Niger territories,
had an epiphany:
“Why not call it Nigeria, dear?”
And he did.
6
This is the body of the world.
We believe in duality.
That is our way.
New religions pose no threat to old
gods only too grateful to shirk.
There is no conflict. We understand.
Many gods sew together our fractured selves,
the schizophrenia that is our true human nature.
The taste for fraternal blood can never be sated.
Again and again,
we kill our kinsmen,
rape our mothers,
pillage our fathers,
make whores of our sisters.
Yet the thirst never slakes.
Caught in black-and-white images:
A young girl howling down a Vietnamese road,
napalm peeling skin raw like a summer grape,
mouth rictusing around scream.
The shadow of child holding book
seared into concrete; Nagasaki.
Bodies sponging up tropical rivers, burst
like overripe mangoes in the sun.
And many will hate me when I say,
None of this is worth dying for.
Be sure: your sins will find you out.
Numbers 32:23.
Even as Chaucer dipped quill into ink
and caught a caesura of history in a language
still undecided, the University in Timbuktu
prepared to celebrate its bicentennial,
its scholars capturing epics
that are now lost in the loose shuffle of sand
covering it. Of all the writing and books,
only a fragment of clay tablet was found.
It spells out the message:
I wrote that in another life.
Inshallah.
Hallowed be thy name.
7
As I grow older I want to hold my mother.
Hold her to my chest and soothe her.
Cradle her head that is small, thin as a sparrow’s,
and say, He loved you, he did.
All those years, they count for something.
And the only lie would be the not knowing.
And I am a man, too.
And like my father, bad, bad, bad.
8
When you first see a man die
from a machete cut or a bullet,
which is to say, when you first confront
the astonishment of blood and feel it
creep over your skin like a sugary sludge,
even though the cracks it wets are not your skin,
but really the obsidian of the road,
you feel sick in ways you thought not possible.
A deep and wonderful bile
that can never leave your stomach.
And then the days pass and you become familiar
with its ways and it bothers you no more
than cherry syrup dripped over pancakes.
You grow bored and impatient with it all.
With the shock of those just-arriving moments.
After that, people can die around you day and night
and you go on without noticing.
My capacity for it scares me.
Blessed are the undefiled in the way.
There are two ways to view the body.
Resurrection and crucifixion.
Everything that falls between is ritual.
DEAR YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA:
Your poem “Ode to the Drum”
pulled me back from many night terrors.
May I roll it around my lips and not kill it
for its exquisite touch.
May I find a way to beat a song back
into these tired lines, these words.
Amen.
Dew
1
I don’t want to wake up in a dark Tanzanian night
without you, or the light of you.
I return to sleep but the smell persists,
the smell that woke me from the deep.
It is a wetness that is dank with earth and leaves
and a compost that can be found nowhere but here.
The funk of my father shaving in the cold
without water or lather and the blade
rasping against cheeks old with denial.
His fingers search for stubble in the dark.
But that smell. It is an old smell.
Somewhere between asparagus piss and towels damp
with the knowledge of snuff washed from hot nostrils.
Somewhere between cloves and the smell of wet grain.
Sometimes it comes upon me now.
Five years after his death and thousands
of miles from where he lived. And died.
It comes upon me, this smell, and I say,
This is my father. This is my father’s spirit.
A Montblanc pen and a moleskin notebook.
Some things here are quietly masculine.
Outsid
e an owl hoots. Inside, the kettle whistles.
There is rain on the roof as I resist this fervent impulse
to be didactic. To say, Father, how could you?
There in the forest is the first glimmer of light.
There it is again.
I am not seeing things so much as
things are seeing me.
Consider this.
My grandfather never summoned the dead,
no matter how heartbroken the widow.
Things that are dead are better left dead.
What is most scary is not whether we can see
the ghost but, rather, the moment the ghost sees us.
Tomorrow is lost like this.
There are fewer things sadder than moss
crawling up an airport wall.
Fractals are like this.
You measure and measure but there is no end.
A wound in the heart can core the earth.
Still, as far as I know, a straight line is still
the fastest way between two points.
Somewhere I saw a white horse gallop
through a sky as dark as velvet, ripe as an aubergine.
There can be no doubt.
My desire is struggling up the mountain.
My fear is a shower of pebbles.
Your son is trying to be a good man, Mum.
Your son is going to be all right.
There are no names for red.
As for amber, what words can be said to God?
Holy the glow.
Holy the O.
Holy the old.
Amen.
Nomad
1
The glue that bound the pages of an old book dries and breaks free.
I am snowed on by flakes of white. Snowed under.
This book will not let me leave unmarked.
I want to be like the man
in Bolaño’s story sitting in
an abandoned car by the highway.
But I don’t want to read Sade. No.
I want to read a text so luminous,
so fucking iridescent that it will transform me
into a creature that I have no name for.
But what is it, this excrescence on my soul?
And how is it that a Californian poet could write so eloquently
about this Nigerian boy’s life without even knowing him?
Or knowing that the act of faith his words would become
could gather in such a heart from the rain.
And finding him, in the middle of my life,
and tracing the tremulous balance of those words
