Message from Aso Rock to a Poet in Exile
- By Pius Adesanmi
- Published June 16, 2005
- Poetry
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Rating:
Pius Adesanmi
Pius Adesanmi, poet and critic, was born in 1972 and obtained a First Class Honours degree in French Studies from the University of Ilorin (1992). He subsequently obtained a Master’s degree and a PhD in the same discipline from the Universities of Ibadan and British Columbia respectively. He has since pursued a career as a scholar of Francophone and Anglophone African and Black Diasporic literatures and cultures. He is a two-time Fellow of the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and has guest-lectured widely in Universities in Africa, Europe, and North America. He has contributed essays on literature and culture to several learned journals, literary reviews, newspapers, and edited books. He regularly serves as a manuscript reviewer for literary publications. His poetry collection, The Wayfarer and Other Poems won the Association of Nigerian Authors Poetry Prize in 2001. He is currently an Associate professor of Literature at Carleton University, Ottawa Canada, and Director, Project on New African Literatures (PONAL).
View all Entries by Pius AdesanmiAn abundance of grey
wears the prisoner's world to rags.
-Ogaga Ifowodo
When the Black Ravens regurgitated Osip
and discarded him in Voronezh
like poisoned cud from the belly of a goat
Adorned the head of his Black Earth
with a crown of cactus,
acupuncture for his weary soles
Planted needles
in the valley of Nadezhda's bosom
where his head hatched plumules in repose
Denied him
a needle-eye's view of the sea
and bound him in a grey room where time
Wearing a wooden mask
shoved him off a spectator's seat
at Aurora's theatre
Fear and the Muse
unbound the bounds
so witnessed Akhmatova
But when his swelled the
'heaped hills of human heads'
congealed in Siberia
Fear and the Muse voyaged to Greece
found Panagoulis in another grey room
and midwifed verses etched in the poet's blood
In Malawi they found undisappearable Mapanje
dining with chameleons and gods in his grey room
and taught him to skip without ropes
Then, Nigeria. The grey room was silent, empty
a dangling noose, an extinct pipe was all they found
fear, now useless, fizzled. Tears were all the Muse had left.
From The Way farer and Other Poems
Johannesburg
For Harry Garuba
Black hands cast the first stone
To welcome the Black immigrant's skull
Black tongues spill the first venom
To wash the Black immigrant's face
Pray who can fathom the depths to which
A man's head will accompany his legs?
The wayfarer's head accompanied his legs
To the land of Ulysses
They called him Barbaroi
The irritant with crude ways
The Nigerian's head accompanies his legs
To the kraal of Mandela
They call him Makwerekwere
The irritant with a crude tongue
Black hands cast the first stone
Crushing the skull of past beneficence
Black hands sow thorns
On paths Mandela trod cap in hand
Returning always with sackloads of petrodollars
Black mouths deride the land
Where the pain of Mbeki's exile
Received the balm of hospitality
Like Ovid at Tomi
Black hands cast the first stone
Black tongues spill the first venom
Spreading the red carpet
For collective amnesia
From The Way farer and Other Poems