Gobetrotter & Hitler’s Children
By Amatoritsero Ede
New York: Akashic Books, 2009
106pp. $17.50
Loving Canada and Hating Hitler’s Children
The result is trapped in a slim pretty book of poetry: Globetrotter and Hitler’s Children, published by Black Goat, a subsidiary of Akashic Books founded by the Nigerian author Chris Abani. First things first, major kudos to Chris Abani: From a production stand point, this book is an impressive job. It is a gorgeous ode to an elegant production, elevating the use of starkness and sparseness to beautiful, tasteful art. It is carefully edited, brooking no compromise whatsoever in quality. This is how books should be published. It is elegant but yet sturdy. Unlike most books I have been reading lately, especially those “published” in Nigeria, this one did not dissolve in my hands. This was not a book hastily slapped together with food glue.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Globetrotter and Hitler’s Children for many reasons and I heartily recommend it. It is an intriguing window into the soul of an eclectic thinker who is struggling mightily to marry two views of poetry – of the traditional, perhaps overly romanticized, and the contemporary, perhaps, too easily dismissed. Ede has made no secret of his contempt for much of what passes for poetry these days. He has garnered a reputation among respectable connoisseurs of the art as a finicky poet largely because his uncompromising ideals in terms of what he believes should be true poetry. Ede is fond of arguing that today’s poet should strive for a happy medium between the traditional and the contemporary and he has admonished the poet to find an appropriate niche compatible, with, and useful to his or her own talents within the provisions of tradition and then, hopefully, progress from there.
The book evocatively illuminates the poet’s struggles – with life and what poetry should be. It is divided into two sections: “Globetrotters” and “Hitler’s Children.” In the first section, Ede is at his best and it is infinitely worth more than the price of the book. Starting with the first page, this is poetry at its most accessible and it showcases a master wordsmith at the peak of his craft. The poetry, ah, the poetry. The prettiest page is the first page: “Toronto/is Amsterdam/ adrift at sea/ it breathes the open atlantic/ where lines and angles blur/ and bend into mist/ Toronto is Prague/ without her anchoring of/ narrow streets narrow sky/ and/ virgin-tight apartment blocks/ it is London long-jumping/ her imperial shadows/ Trafalgar-ing into space.” (17) Tight and nice. Poetry doesn’t get much better than this. But in Ede’s world, it thankfully does: “amongst the ruin and jazz/ of the old distillery/ young Toronto/ stops outside of troy/ in full teenage glare/ hair streaked with lightening/ because a girl smells better…/ she brushes a suitor’s kiss/ and the sun off her thundering skin” (22). Scrumptious.
The writing life for the sensitive immigrant of color can be tricky and frustrating. Self-absorption is a common affliction. Memories of Africa tend to burden the immigrant. There is an overabundance of documentation of the immigrant forcing life through the shattered lenses of (forced) exile. In Ede’s book, especially in the Globetrotter section, Africa’s memories are not needy; they do not swamp the poet’s sensitivities. In Globetrotters, Ede plumbs every nook and cranny of Canada with his razor sharp muse-eye. The result is brilliant, well, mostly. To the uninitiated, there are some puzzling lines that seemed grafted into meaning, like variations of red hot angst bleeding out of the reddened wayes of torture, and toil. Regardless, the reader’s heart melts with compassion at a life unraveling deep within the cold mystery of a riddle-journey: “Tears long as a calendar year/ and look where the street car has left a scar/ in the brush flower/ as it goes berlin-ing around queens avenue" (19).
The poetry fills the reader’s imagination with wonder; sin-rich opportunities lurk everywhere and the mind makes endless phallic trips: ”What does the endless/north american sky/ reveal/ like those sex workers/ in amsterdam’s love quarters/ she says simply/ I am wide open.” (p20) Yet wide vistas of opportunity narrow into tight-slit perspectives of reality and real despair: “So the street car becomes a train/ in slow phallic rush on laan van meerdervoort/in the hague/ flirting foolishly with the horizon/ the red light flashes /where there are no red-light districts.” (p20)
The section Globetrotter ends up being one long delightful poem, a gorgeous bouquet of pretty words arranged lovingly to produce a gently bubbling brook of immense depth: “here/you may turn the other cheek/ amongst your treeing laugh/many-timbered/ and not be impaled/ by hate’s spiked planks/ but only redistribute air/ lung it up larynx/ air/ streaming over tongue/ mirth-warmed to expand/ lumber up and down/ your tree-trunk torso/ till you shake limb/ after trembling limb… “(p33)
In Globetrotter, Ede uses delightful turns of phrases to unearth poetic gems. There are all these interesting and clever plays on words that flirt with the danger of imagined things. Globetrotter is a fresh poem, fresh as sizzling hissing fresh-baked bread. Perceptive. Nice.
It would be exciting to set Globetrotter to a visual presentation on video with a voice-over – a warm voice caressing all the places Ede’s spirit has been because in those places “where all colours meet/ a rainbow democracy signals spring/…as spring-spruced statues sparkle/ what green leaves and trees do too/ happy as the woodworm is happy.” (23) That would be nice.
If the section Globetrotter represents the accessible and contemporary, the second section Hitler’s Children represents the traditional and aloof, daring mere mortals to even look its way. The title Hitler’s Children does the poem an injustice of sorts. In a sense it does not tell the story that it promises. Unlike Globetrotter which is one long series of movements, Hitler’s Children is a series of unrelated poems. The poems in this section are not all about Germany. They veer and wander all over the place in minds and hearts where Germany is a skin head’s footnote. The burden of the section seems lost in the opacity of self-absorption and in the dawning reality that several of the poems were written at several intervals long apart with little defining or uniting them. Perhaps the title of the second section should have tamped the expectation of a coherent thread. Take the poem The Skinhead’s Lord’s Prayer. It is an impish play on The Lord’s Prayer; however it misses by a wide margin a desired irreverence and dissolves into giggly clichés. It does however make for an interesting conversation piece, trying to decode the nexus between the Lord’s Prayer and Ede’s Germany. Their Lord is probably not amused. Not that Ede cares. Almost juvenile in delivery, Ede comes across as a petulant guest throwing rocks at Germany’s dark issues. In the poem, Not in Love, troubling is the imagery: behold the national prick at half mast/ at the international fuck exchange/ rape is amerieuropean. (63) Is this vision, narcissism, or self absorption? This is a one-man Intifada against a Nazi Goliath but these are mostly inchoate lines birthed from poorly suppressed rage. The discipline of the first section Globetrotters gives way to a routine slapdash compilation of unrelated stanzas. And Ede’s poetry yields to an undisciplined militancy. Beautiful images still escape the chaos: all our folk songs/ ungathered/ like a beautiful note/ strangled in the beak/ of a singing country… (64) And the poem Anike is quite simply delicious in the way it shows off Ede’s gifts: “and at night/when she finally explodes/ you shall have ashes in your mouth/ fire on your tail/ earth shall tremble/ as the volcano coughs. (97)
Ede is preoccupied by the ceaseless and restless movement of people. Excitement is the child’s allotment/ when ships throw down rusted anchor/ at Lagos/ that old colonial port…/when boat and Eagle spread rag-sail/ summon wind flutter and fly/ on the prow of a baleful river. (p103) Upon reading those lines, the reader ponders the theme or notion of exile in the age of Facebook. When were these lines born? Why does it matter? How is the world of today’s exile different from that of Wole Soyinka? Why does it matter? Should good poetry not withstand the test of time? Time will tell if what the reader sees in some of Ede’s verse is the shelf life radiating past tense. Regardless, Ede is a brilliant seer who refuses to be left behind at the train station waiting for that ride backwards to claps of thunder.
Ede is a diviner and sometimes not everything that comes out of him makes sense to the supplicant gazing at the cowries: Listen to this: Unkind cut!/ stained is the day/ the blood-spattered hour/ when the night-trapped Mare/ staggers/ into jet-fuel light/ in its canter/ an age of lightnings and enlightenment/ Kant’s light so bright/ it blinded him to a vision/ where nightmares Kant-er/ after the enlightenment/Kant cannot. (p89) It is haunting, pretty and delicate like lace, but like some of Christopher Okigbo’s elegant pieces, it is almost impossible to make sense of it. But it is pretty and that is enough for me.
I must say that the book as a medium of expression does a huge injustice to Ede’s vision, prodigy and industry. I say to the poet, go to YouTube, the mother of true convergence. Ede experiments vigorously with the spatial placement of words on paper. The idea, it seems is to make the words leap out of paper, hurling meaning at the reader. I am not sure he is successful. The arrangement of words all over the place on a one-dimensional canvas is remarkable only in its determined deliberateness. Why are all these words all over the place? In some instances, the words lay prostrate shell-shocked on white paper like bombed out war planes on a paper tarmac looking askance at their owner's command to fly, just fly. This is an experiment best suited to the robustness of a three dimensional medium. Ede needs YouTube and a voice-over.
In Hitler’s Children, some of the poems are merely eclectic. The mind wanders and wonders– images of unrelated anxieties bleed into the memories of the promise of the rendering producing mind-clutter. Some of the poems are inaccessible and the reader hurriedly skirts the clutter to shards of beauty. In Hitler’s Children, Ede’s thoughts often wander from Germany sometimes into somewhere even darker – places populated with phalluses, blood, sex, and water. There is something about sex and water that fascinates Ede. Where Globetrotter is suffused with freshness, energy and vigor all over, Hitler’s Children is a gathering of good poetry sharing space with undisciplined angst. We have Canada to thank for burying some of Ede’s Germany-demons. It is a good thing that Hitler’s Germany is tucked in the back of this pretty book. Canada is Ede’s best foot forward and he shows it off regally in Globetrotter and assures the reader that this is an important read.
An Elegy for Easterly
by Petina Gappah
London, UK: Faber and Faber, 2009
288 pp. $21.25
The Storyteller from Easterly
The streets of Zimbabwe keep patrolling my mind creating gentle vistas and memories of a beautiful place that refuses to go away despite the horrific efforts of President Robert Gabriel Mugabe. And Oh, what a book. You should see this book. It is drop-dead gorgeous, an attractive spirit that stirs things in my heart and loins each time I spy it showing itself off on my coffee table. Quite simply, An Elegy for Easterly is a pretty book of gorgeous short stories and Gappah will probably end up being one of the smartest new writers to come out of Africa in a long time. I must say that her publisher, Faber and Faber knows how to put together a beautiful book. The workmanship shows professionalism and pride in an output. I looked and looked and looked and I could not find a single editorial fault with the book. The result is, well, drop-dead gorgeous. This is an attractive book, Africa as life, breathing deeply and richly out of its pretty cover, a book so pretty I was too intimidated to write notes on its pages.
In Gappah’s book, freshly-baked story-loaves fill my reading world with the complex smells of Zimbabwe. And Africa, that persistent lover, comes calling again. These are all tender stories told by a master story-teller. The brilliance of this book is its universality – short stories about Zimbabwe morph into a grand tour of our humanity. Sadness and joy envelop issues that are common to all of us – disease, injustice, corruption, patriarchy, sexuality, etc. The title story An Elegy for Easterly is an elegant, intimate story of a man hyper-dancing to the rhythm of Zimbabwe’s fading fortunes. It is quite simply beautiful, this story and it showcases Gappah’s intimate, loving mastery of the Zimbabwe landscape. The story At the Sound of the Last Post explodes with guns gently blazing at Zimbabwe’s handlers: “It is three months since inflation reached 3,000,325 percent per annum, making billionaires of everyone, even maids and gardeners.” (p9). Keep reading, gentle reader; the prose gets even more scrumptious, if that is possible. The prose in these stories is pretty and gently muscular, just throaty enough to still keep you hanging on to the edge of your seat: “I helped him to write furious letters of righteous indignation condemning the white-settler regime and the situation in his country. I forgot about the fight against apartheid in my own country as his battle seemed more urgent. We wrote letters and hosted exiles and through long nights we argued about Fanon and Biko and Marx and Engels. That was before we arrived in the country after independence. Before I found out that my husband already had a wife with three children, whose names were not gentle on the tongue.” (p 9) At the Sound of the Last Post is a well aimed catapult salvo of insults fired gleefully at the house of Robert Mugabe. Gappah’s words are pretty little daggers gently drawn, plunging lustily into the manhood of oppressive beasts. The sweet bitterness of her words extracts sweet victory from felled dictators. Tart prose cuts everything in its path to bite-sized sniveling pieces as she expertly documents the circus that has hijacked authentic leadership in Zimbabwe, and by extension, much of Africa. Zimbabwe’s government is exposed as populated by buffoon-leaders goose-stepping to the pretty drum-beats of pretend rituals pilfered from more purposeful and serious societies.
Our Man in Geneva Wins a Million Euros is easily one of the funniest stories of greed fueled by need that I have ever read in my lifetime. It is delectable and masterfully done. The main character is caught in a 419 money scam; told he has won a million Euros, he dreams of riches that he will use to quell the raging financial demands of his nuclear and extended family. The story races breathlessly to a predictable end, but still leaves the reader sighing with an overwhelming sense of sadness and empathy for the victim, and us. Gappah is that good. It is easy to forget that like Zimbabwe, the characters in these stories mostly go nowhere fast. The banality of impoverished existence haunts and poetry rises to sweetly ambush the reader already wary of sad Africa stories. And sad and haunting is the prose-poetry: “There are almost no whites in the country now. Everything is black and green and brown and white. Black is the marble of the polished gravestones and the mourning clothes. Green is the presidential sash and the olive colors of the berets on the heads of the soldiers and the artificial shining verdancy of the grave. Black is the dark of the gathered masses who listen to the youth choir dressed for battle in bottle-green fatigues, voices hoarse in the August heat, singing songs from a war that they are not allowed to forget. Black and brown are the surrounding Warren Hills, the hills denuded, with stumps remaining where the trees were, the green trees now the brown wood that replaces the electricity that is not to be found in the home.” (p4) Just when you think Africa has exhausted her store of sad stories, a fresh batch unearths itself. Is there an end to this?
In Gappah’s stories, we go to places of despair now owning only pretty names and precious little else. But comedy steals past filthy skirts of despair and it is really funny. The chaos is uniform and universal “She did not come with those who arrived after the government cleaned the townships to make Harare pristine for the three-day visit of the Queen of England. All the women who walk alone at night are prostitutes, the government said – lock them up, the Queen is coming. There are illegal structures in the townships, they said – clean them up. The townships are too full of people, they said, gather them up and put them in the places the Queen will not see, in Porta Farm, in Hatcliffe, in Dzivaresekwa Extension, in Easterly. Allow them temporary structures, and promise them real walls and doors, windows and toilets.” (p27) It is too early to compare her to Jhumpa Lahiri but her debut book is on par with Lahiri’s latest, Unaccustomed Earth. Indeed, where Lahiri is proprietary and almost insular (albeit in a disciplined way), Gappah expertly reaches out beyond the boundaries of Zimbabwe to speak to all of us.
The Maid from Lalapanzi is a heartbreaking love story, beautiful in its simplicity and in its complexity. The story spoke, in joyous prose, of a time when there were tight physical boundaries and it was easier to fight for freedom than to flee from terror. In this story Gappah warmly travels through the remains of Zimbabwe, planting seed-stories of life. The heartbreak is of the good kind multiplied many times over and it in turn mass produced multiple sighs from my rugged heart. This writer is good. The Maid from Lalapanzi will stay with me for a very long time for it unleashed in me a warm gush of childhood and adolescent memories. I grinned as I read the love letters. Love blooms happily and lustily, even in the terror-infested weeds of Zimbabwe. The love letters were penned Onitsha Market literature style: “My sweetheart Blandina… Time, fortune and opportunity have forced me to take up my hand to pen this missive to ask how you are pulling the wagons of existence and to tell you how much I love you. My heart longs for you like tea longs for sugar. I wish for you like meat wishes for salt, and I miss you like a postman would miss his bicycle…” (p139) Hilarious. And sweet.
Meticulously researched details are important to Gappah. Not even the most private of details escapes her eyes. She notes everything including the invasiveness of the new commercialism: “The women from Johnson and Johnson had come to the school, and separated us from the boys so that they could tell us secrets about our bodies. They said the ovum would be released from the ovary and travel down the fallopian tube and, if it was not fertilized, it would be expelled every twenty-two to twenty-eight days in the act of menstruation. It was an unsanitary time, they said, Our most effective weapon against this effluence was the arsenal of the sanitary products that Johnson and Johnson made with young ladies like us in mind, they said, because Johnson cared.” (p137) Crass commercialism promoting self-loathing to sell the excess of capitalism. Lovely.
It is fortunate and refreshing that Gappah’s stories do not follow the formulaic patterns favored by the story minting machines of MFA programs. However, there is probably enough to quibble about in the stories. Every now and then, Gappah tries too hard to end a story and it becomes an unwieldy elephant that has been wrestled down and lashed together with weak cords of incredulity. An Elegy for Easterly gathers her wrappers too tightly and clatters too quickly to an ungainly full stop. They say most writers begin with autobiographical stories. One or two of Gappah’s stories come across as fairly autobiographical. Also there are all these lovely stories that trick the reader into forgetting that sometimes, their key ingredient is their improbability. But so what? Life can be improbable, life is an untidy mess. Like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Gappah could be accused fairly or unfairly of spreading contempt for African men. There is this persistent hint of misandry – the stories are populated by weak waves of weak men fashioning absurd rules to fit their anxieties. That, plus her thinly veiled contempt for Mugabe exposes her to the charge a number of her stories are political statements masquerading as short stories. My verdict: I don’t care, I love this book.
Ikhide Ikheloa is a reviewer, essayist and journalist. He has published several essays, short stories and poems in online and print journals and newspapers including Eclectica and Fogged Clarity. He writes a weekly column online and in print for the Nigerian newspaper 234Next. His work has also been featured in books and anthologies like Ogoni Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria. Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah ed. (USA: AWP, 1998) and Weaverbird Collection. Akin Adesokan et al ed. (Lagos: Kachifo, 2008). He lives in the United States.
September 15th, 2009
Jon Paul Fiorentino awarded 2009 Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry
August 1st, 2009
Amatoritsero Ede publishes much anticipated book
