http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com An Electronic Publication of Liberian Arts and Letters Sat, 02 Jan 2010 05:30:37 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en David Wolobah [1] (Vol 6, Issue 1, May 2009) Visit the Sea Breeze gallery [2] for more art from David Wolobah. [1] http://apps.liberiaseabreeze.com/Gallery/album.cfm?a=6351 [2] http://apps.liberiaseabreeze.com/Gallery/album.cfm?a=6351 http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/2074 Amos Boyce [1] (Vol 6, Issue 2, Nov 2009) Visit the Sea Breeze gallery [2] for more art from Amos Boyce. [1] http://apps.liberiaseabreeze.com/Gallery/album.cfm?a=9092 [2] http://apps.liberiaseabreeze.com/Gallery/album.cfm?a=9092 http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/2067 Strange Solitude 71 years old and after a diabetes-induced stroke last year, I have one foot in the grave as they say, but I don’t really feel death. Not until my wife Marian and two sons, Benedict and Daniel, leave after checking me into the Cobb Skilled Nursing Center today, a sun-filled day that abruptly turned coal-gray. Since the stroke I live most of my life in my room with its dull tan walls and white ceiling. There’s a wooden ceiling fan that doesn’t work, collecting dust and cobwebs. The one east-facing window in the room has blinds with several broken blades. My manual wheelchair sits in a corner waiting for its limited use. Then there’s a straight-backed gray metal chair that Marian and the boys plop me on when they change my bedding. A squat table sits against the wall, under the window. I used to eat on it until it became littered with pills, powder, soap, deodorant, air fresheners, cleaning solutions, adult diapers, and lotions. Later, Marian brought in a wooden barstool whose seat now serves as a table. I sleep on a convalescent medical bed with power adjustable sections. I don’t really care for the movement but my family thinks it helps. There is a clock on the wall in front of my bed that taunts me with its loud ticking. My family is convinced I lost my senses in the stroke and the minor ones that followed. My mind is still active though no one engages it anymore. To stay relevant, the damn thing picks up everything: the off-color paint on the patched holes on the walls; the closet ajar, overstuffed with my diapers; the brown spots on the beige carpet which tell of my past mistakes; the fade of my clothes because they’re washed after each wear; the streetlight just beyond my window; how the blinds in my room light up bronze for a new day and turn gray when night came. I also notice how my sons, especially Daniel, now wear a different skin in order to adapt to life here in the States. We had come here after the war in Liberia forced us out of Greenville, Sinoe last year, which was also not long after I had fallen out. Several of Benedict’s front teeth overlap, and his face, interrupted by black pocks of old pimples, seems disturbingly long upon first view, but then grows on you as distinguished.  Daniel has large, sleepy eyes that seem to weigh down his face. He told his mother, who told me, that girls love his eyes. He has flabby girth unlike everyone else in our family. Benedict, older but smaller than Daniel, always tries to pull rank; Daniel, stubborn, rebels so the two of them live in an ongoing argument. To compound the issue, each thinks he is smarter than the other. Benedict reminds me of my younger self: intelligent, malleable, shy. I was so shy that though I had ring-in-pocket Marian had to nudge me to propose. Daniel brought thoughts of a later time in my life, when I had manufactured a facade of confidence and self-assurance. Years ago, before the war and my stroke changed everything, I had mentioned to Marian how the boys reminded me of myself. Through her dimpled smiled she said, “Goat can’t born sheep.” We laughed together that day as I rediscovered her slender shoulders, the thick hair that fell to her nape, her tender dimples that dipped just so. Yet, her beauty wasn’t enough to tame the person that artificial confidence had created. Every day my wife wakes up while it is still dark to care for me before heading off to her job as a counselor at an adult education center. She ends her day tending to me in the evenings. On the weekends house chores replace her job. Me-work-me, every day. Once, before she prayed the morning awake with me, before she dressed for work, Marian said: “Thank goodness our boys are here with us,” she shook her head as though there was a fly on it she didn’t want to disturb. “I couldn’t handle you by myself much longer.” This was after the first pains, when her fingers had started to morph into claws. They, like my muscles, became their own entities detached from her brain. Later, when her arthritis went into full bloom it was painful for her to clean and change me, and for me to watch her struggle. My muscles, now unreliable, rule. When they began to forget simple things like walking and getting out of bed, I had tried to fool them into working, but only succeeded in pissing Marian off. I was slower due to muscle amnesia, so I pre-planned my moves to the bathroom. I made it a few times by taking off my pants in the room soon after I struggled to stand up. The strategy eventually betrayed me. My final try was when Marian found me naked in the hallway, with my handiwork caked on the carpet, a wall and my room door. She dropped her purse and the bag of groceries she was carrying and just started to cry at the top of the stairs leading from the garage. I’d caused her too much pain over the years; I couldn’t add this to it. “Aye Jallah what’ve you done to me so?” Marian said that day. Spread on the floor in the middle of brown insides, I could feel the sunlight forcing itself through my closed blinds, but it felt dark when my wife asked me that question. “Why’d you take your clothes off for?” My breathing was weighed down by cement blocks while I said a lot of things in my head: I know when I need to go to the bathroom; I’ve done it several times when no one was around. Why did I take off my clothes? So I didn’t have to deal with them when I got to the bathroom... But all my mouth let me say was “Because,” then I pointed at my room door. “This is pure foolishness,” Marian was shaking her head, as if pitying herself more than me. “You finish messing up the whole room.” On my way to the restroom my stomach had begun to pour so I had tried to speed up; it was then my muscles deserted me and I fell. My hands were soiled because I had tried to stop the flowing and had plastered the wall when I used it to break my fall. The room smelled like a dump pile choked with scraps of old food that had been slow-rotted by broiling heat; the kind of smell that compels you to turn away lest you discover the source. I was trying to remind my muscles how to get me off the floor when Marian walked in. Not once did she turn her head from me, as though she didn’t smell a thing. My broken body wasn’t all that suffered my wife. Her eyes wrote her soul on her face so I knew she was surviving on fumes from the first three years of our 24-year marriage, the good years.  In spite of it all Marian’s eyes told me she felt sorry I was now trapped in my body. Marian cared for me and our home in faithful repetition as I stepped out time and again, sometimes brashly. The relationships died natural deaths as the ladies left me for more exciting men, men whose confidence was not faked like mine. When the ones who made Marian cry during the night left, she remained with the still-stale me, in faithful repetition. I even used to go blind. The most recent occurrence was in Liberia last year when I emerged from my lover’s room to windless air colored with Harmattan dust, a brownish-gray screen which made the day forlorn and took my sight away. I could not see my children or the marital rigors demanded by my Catholic faith. My wife was invisible to me and I could not see any of the plans and dreams we created together as we labored through graduate school abroad in the ‘60s. And so I came home that wretched day to tell Marian I was blind to her and my previous life. I fumbled for the door knob because I couldn’t see that either and stepped into the room I was sure could not continue to be mine; my happiness was elsewhere. Then, I heard her voice, whispery, echoing in the back of my head, riding a convoluted wave to consciousness: “Jallah...Jallah.” My body was locked, eyes still shut, but I managed to force out a few words. “Where am I? What happened?” Her reply lodged itself in the space just in front of my eyes. I felt its warmth, then smelled the sterility of obsessive cleaning, of medicine. “In the hospital,” Marian said. “You fell out; the doctor said you had a stroke.” A wave of consciousness crashed in my throat. I opened my eyes and saw Marian, as beautiful as she was the day we married, stroking my arm, my head, as if I were a baby. I thought, Why me? Why did this happen to me? At that moment Marian, in a place between smile and scorn, without pause in her supple caress, said: “Maybe my God saw you.” Since my stroke I often feel like I am falling with my hands tied behind my back—the floor races up to meet my body with vengeance, then the pain of contact. Crashing this way pulverizes my will. A piece of me disintegrates with each episode. After a while my family and friends begin talking about me in my presence as if I am not there. I think of a lot to say, but the words, as if entering a place that would suffocate them, only stumble out one or two at a time. And so I begin to rock back and forth to signal to my beloveds that I am present and understand what they are saying. A rare time, when one of my sons had wheeled me to the living room to watch TV, I had rocked while Daniel and Benedict talked about me, around me. Daniel said: “Pops trippin’ hard now.” “Why you say that?” Benedict said. “You check out what dude did to his sheet?” Then Benedict, “Yeah, don’t  know whatin he was thinking.” “Bingo,” Daniel added, “he don’t think no mo’. He g’on.” He circled his pointing finger near his temple. I rocked like a praying mantis to tell him how wrong he was. After less than a year in the States my son had made himself sound like an idiot. He tried so hard to sound like an American but his seerees was a laughable mishmash of his natural Liberian lilt and the idiosyncrasies of American speech patterns. He was stuck in odd-sounding purgatory. When Marian asked about his comical inflection and poor grammar Daniel explained that he spent so much time talking to co-workers, customers and friends that his new way of speaking “just came naturally.” The corners of my old fitted sheets were frayed and loose so they slipped off the edges of my mattress, like okra sauce slithering down a person’s throat. When the deceitful corners slipped they curled towards the middle of the bed and the cold plastic mattress cover tortured my skin. I got painful cold bumps with hairs sticking through them each time.  Since my mouth wouldn’t allow me to explain the discomfort I thought I was being smart when I munched on the sheets. The shreds of cloth spread on the floor near my bed only helped convince my family I was senile. When I got new bedding with reliable corners I didn’t eat the sheets any longer, but my boys still take me out of my room today, and into this nursing center eventhough they can’t say I am still acting crazy. When Marian’s arthritis began getting worse she asked Daniel to feed and clean me in the day, Benedict in the night. Daniel did everything too fast, as if a child hurrying to go play. He stripped me naked in a way that felt criminal. He wiped my insides off me but smeared some back on because he was in such a rush. Marian had a few workmates and their families visiting on a November day in Georgia chilled with deep-throated air. Daniel dragged himself into my room and left the door open. He couldn’t stand my smell so he lifted the blinds and raised the window, letting in the biting air. His body language suggested I prop myself up, then fly away through the gap in the window. I was naked against the straight-backed metal chair as men, women, and children strolled past the open door on their way to the restroom. I sat trembling from cold and anger and embarrassment. My son didn’t even notice. One evening after Benedict had set my food on the seat of the wooden barstool Daniel entered the room, which was strange. He got so disgusted from dealing with me in the morning that I usually did not see Daniel until he lumbered in the next day. He had just gotten home from his job as a bank teller and still had on his dress shirt, but not his tie. It was dark outside; I could see the glow from the street light. Sometimes they left my shades slanted, not shut, and I would look at that light for as long as I could trick my eyes to stay open. In the morning I usually gazed towards the light pole. The bulb was always off but I looked anyway. “We gonna have ta do somethin’ with Pops damn quick,” Daniel said in his strange accent. “Like whatin?” Benedict said in Liberian patois. He, unlike his brother, only switch-codes when he speaks to Americans. “Like take him someplace.” “Why?” Benedict was prepping to feed me my dinner. “Mama’s arthritis done kicked in; she ina lotta pain these days,” Daniel explained. “True,” Benedict said. He began to feed me. “And,” Daniel continued, standing in the doorway, “I’m gonna be workin’ overtime ‘cuz we short at the bank.” “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Benedict said. “I myself going through the same thing at my owna job.” He is a sales representative at an electronics store. Then Daniel said: “Pops done got real bad; we gonna have to put dude ina home.” Though Benedict hadn’t washed and changed me several times when he was supposed to, I had expected him to go against his younger brother. But, there was no resistance, no argument. Their sibling bickering aside, maybe they were the same, just packaged in unique ways. Daniel and Benedict complained I was worse only after Marian’s fingers conspired to bend into themselves. Because they had to handle more of my care. I grunted. Wanted to speak but my mouth was filled with food. My brain raced. I began to chew faster than normal. I knew my mouth couldn’t keep up with my head to say what needed to be said, but I had to say something. Benedict admonished me, as would a parent to child, not to chew too fast before I choked. He was not as respectful as he had been when we were in Greenville. I grunted again, then choked. Daniel was chuckling when he asked me: “Pops, wanna go to ah nursin’ home?” His eyes were laughing too; I didn’t recognize them; they were different in Liberia. This time my mouth said everything my brain was thinking: “No.” ***** The window blinds are bright bronze today when Benedict and his younger brother Daniel suspend their wrangling, bring me down from my room and wrestle me into Marian’s silver-blue Accord. My legs no longer work, so moving me demands that my boys shut up and focus. I squint to control the sun’s glare when we back out of the garage of our house at 1100 Maplewood Drive in Marietta, Georgia. I remember the address because I had had to memorize it for our visa interview at the American Embassy in Monrovia. I had said it over and over during the arduous road trip from Sinoe. The day starts sunny then turns to the color of rain when we pull into the circular driveway of the six-story teal building. The sun would return later. I can’t recall the last time I had been out of the house. After we are shown into my room here at the nursing home I realize that the odor of bland food and the silence of old feet I had noticed as Daniel pushed my wheelchair down the hallway are in my room as well. Why is Marian leaving me here? My sons busy themselves unpacking my suitcase and arranging things. It was the same suitcase Marian had used to pack the few belongings we escaped with from the war raging in Liberia. We had come to the United Sates together, now she was leaving me here and going back to our home: 1100 Maplewood Drive. The attendant points things out in the room with waves of her hand, then demonstrates the flexibility of the bed to us. It has more adjustable sections than my bed at home. “It can even fold into a chair,” she says before leaving. Benedict and Daniel are almost done putting my things away when Marian clears her throat and says, “Jallah, you may not understand but this is the best thing for you.”  Her eyes cry out as emotions bend the corners of her mouth, so I can tell Marian is against moving me to the center. Reality had changed the rules when her hands began acting as if mounted on rusty hinges. I am crying too but unsure if my face shows it as my body now does its own thing. I’m only in full control of my brain though not sure whether that’s a blessing or a curse. “The boys think you’re getting worse,” her voice is soft, like a chicken’s feather. Marian doesn’t sound as if she believes what she’s saying. “And I can’t help you like I used to.” She looks at her bent fingers. She’s not supposed to put her sick husband away. Has my wife swallowed the same Americanism that makes my son speak like a fool? Maybe she’s paying me back for my years of blindness. Perhaps she is just tired. Maybe if I had changed my ways before I became handicapped.... Water clouds my sight. She holds both hands in front of her, palms up as if receiving communion. I’m not blind now so I remember communion from the many Sunday masses we attended together. “You need to be here so you don’t hurt yourself—fall down or something like that. Don’t want anything  bad to happen to you.” I believe that last part and think how this would not be happening if we were still in Liberia. In our country families cared for their elders just as they did their very young—there were no nursing homes, no places where old people were deposited to await, in strange solitude, their final passage to the ancestors. “No,” I whisper, though I want to say more but don’t, or can’t. “No, what?” Marian asks. All I do is push out the air trapped in my chest. Marian goes outside to talk with one of the attendants. While she is away Daniel says, “Daddy, you g’on be ok.” I search his body language for cynicism but find none, search his eyes for sarcasm that isn’t there. He had called me Daddy, like he used to growing up. “Yeah, you’ll be alright,” Benedict endorses. “We’ll visit you plenty, I swear.” There was my oldest acting like the oldest. I feel close to my boys, as I used to when we lived on the beach in Greenville and they used to bring me the cold water of young coconuts as soon as I got home from work; when I used to tell them how proud I was of them when they did well in school. I nod at my sons, held by the bliss of this closeness. My sons and I are smiling at each other when Marian walks back in the room. They leave a short while later. I stare outside and see Daniel first. He has a confused countenance swirling about him like he is being pulled by unknown forces. Regret? Benedict is walking towards the driver’s door, brooding. Then I notice Marian looking in the direction of my room; her face carries the pity of our entire family. The fingers of her right hand still bent into a claw. She keeps swiveling her head as if searching for the right window. Does she see me? I keep looking at her wishing she does. I shut my eyes to hold onto the sight of my wife and children. When I open them they and the car are gone. It is then my chest caves on itself, an avalanche of pity, holding air hostage; my Adam’s apple, a swollen knot of fire, chars my throat. Hair on my body, like soldiers in formation, stand erect, mounted on cold bumps that look like a gathering of frightened hills. My brain slaps my skull as if a dirty cloth being flogged against a washing rock. I clench my fist and pull a wad of bed sheet into my mouth to protest the cruel changes, to protest death. At that moment I hear: “Daddy, you g’on be ok. Yeah, you’ll be alright. We’ll visit you plenty, I swear.” I look through the open blinds and notice the solitary streetlight at attention just to the left of my room. The heavy rain clouds have drifted away, releasing their grip on the light, and the sun, unshackled, beats the pole at an angle that causes a blinding reflection. I don’t alter my gaze as the brightness wrings tears from the insides of my eyes. When I feel the humid stream on my cheek my entire body warms up and I know my skin soldiers have returned to their barracks. The sharp light slices into my brain and stops the suicidal slapping. Tortured blood courses my veins relieving the parched tightness which had made me feel like over-fried meat. Is death leaving? I pull the sheet out of my mouth and continue to stare at the window to watch its departure. I hold my gaze on the star-shaped reflection off the pole until the sun, which had spread its hands in warm embrace when my boys brought me out of our house today, begins to change positions, not wanting to disappoint time. As it moves, the healing reflection pulls itself away. It is then I see the bulb of the street light which had been obscured by the glare. It is off. I breathe wide and long as if I’d hurriedly filled two barrels with water from a well many feet away. I keep looking out the window when someone opens my door and rolls something in; a food tray maybe. No words. I sense the person approaching my bed but don’t glance because I’m focused on the streetlamp. Still no words. When does the street light come on? I wonder as my bed transforms to a chair. http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1989 TRC Forgive me for the multitudes that did die But to say I killed them is a blatant lie I’ve never killed a fly or even kicked a dog If I ate human flesh, they told me it was hog Forgive me that many women got themselves raped We could not help it, they were so beautifully shaped Forgive me for the forest that got exported Damned reporters should never have reported Forgive me for how we pillaged the country Only a fool will fight war and not share the bounty How else were we supposed to get rich To build houses, own cars and satellite dish Forgive, forgive is the way of the TRC I will also forgive you for getting angry at me Forgive and don’t you dare suggest war crimes court We won’t hesitate to return to the shooting sport A  DYING STATESMAN TO HIS SON An aging statesman lay on his cozy deathbed Ruminating on his life so sumptuously led He thought of his Rolex watch, Italian wines and limousines Of diamond rings, caviar and French cuisine ‘Twas a life so sheltered and so full of many good things And it wasn’t once he’d exchanged wedding rings But as he lay ravaged by the scourge of a great disease It was the means but not the quality that caused him unease Were God so kind as another earthly life to grant This statesman would still rub shoulders with the elegant But now that he must account for all he had done His family name he sought through his son to atone “Weep not son that I must leave to meet my maker, But promise me to be a patriot and not a nation breaker, Abhor all forms of corruption and live above reproach, In every deed let your conscience be your coach.” But the son who had learned all the ways of his father Which he was told were the ways of his father’s father Was not amused that his dream to perfect the ‘art’ of corruption Was been unsanctioned by such verbal deathbed eruptions Before his lips could unleash unruly accusations His father was quick to offer placating explanations “It wasn’t greed but prudence that led us to do what we did For in our times honest labor was just a useless bid.” “But now that I’ve amassed so much to last you two generations, You have no cause to engage in any financial misappropriation, Creating the image of genuine nobility should your only dedication, For it’s a promise we’ve failed to keep for many generations.” With such revelations the statesman took his last breath Leaving his son to digest the philosophy of ill-acquired wealth He thought of the moment, of credit crunch and global recession And what ‘prudence’ will make him do for future generation FODAY SANKOH One chilly moon-lit in December, The gasping ghost of Foday Sankoh Scurried across the diamond fields of Kenema. He was neither in search of guns or diamonds Nor relics of the ruthless battles fought here. But from his cracked ghostly lips the word ‘peace’ Exploded in rapid volleys liked cursed bullets From the broken muzzle of an angry Kalashnikov As he struggled to maintain balance and pace. And his pursuers were relentless. They were in their thousands; A riotous crowd of dismembered limbs— There were grey-haired hands and very young hands Dark-skinned hands and fair-skinned hands Muscular hands and skinny hands ‘Short sleeves’ and ‘long sleeves’ Scarred hands and silk-satin smooth hands Single hands and pairs of hands Hands of toddlers and babes, Of young girls with polished nails Hands of artisans a and housewives Of farmers and musicians. And those hands had voices That rose and ebbed like angry storms Their demand bizarre but simple ‘WE WANT OUR BODIES! WE WANT OUR BODIES! The echoes reverberated across the diamond fields As the army of amputated limbs Charged for the soul of Foday Sankoh. It was a sorry sight, a paradox of the politics of power To see a revolutionary ghost like Foday Sankoh Preaching peace while been pursued Not by his victims themselves, But remnants of their mutilated frames. Copyright © Obed W. Dolo 2009 http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1939 Bulk Challenge When the bulk descended on Monrovia all crashed It was night of the day the town to pieces smashed Smoke puffed from artillery bombarded and trashed The metropolis while yanna boys and big shots fused they fled The lines that slice up society blurred women and children bled Babies’ cries booming off bulwarks they were bundled Their only hiding place – tiny little blankets fondled By the tender wobbly hands of their mothers as they cradled Their young, blasts and flashes consumed the open air bullets rained On the innocent like a thousands pellets. Nigerian soldiers patrolled Whips in hand set to maintain order only that they too led By their own excess to stowaway the stowaways their creed Blood ran in the streets as in summer a garden watered In the raucous port sweating profusely was the action centered Bulk challenge sat there with an elegant poise that shone Like a newly minted coin meant the shrines to be offered In her pull we broke kola nuts our fortune counted She wore a beautiful smile that disarmed Even the wicked amongst us as she was swarmed Citizens hung with hope undue to thread and Her welcome presence on Bushrod Island Spread like sandstorm in a hot desert afternoon Men descended onto the creature as if going to the moon A privileged entry and free for all to be deciphered soon And there she sat like a duck graceful, we her goons Like a swan unperturbed her beak waving freely In the open air while the waves slapped her side to side Like this was Christmas, she dressed like a spoiled Teen attired showing off her cost and anchored like a Queen Mary readying to lead her subjects to safety Our testimonies all the same how could this be but glad for her timely Arrival abating our commotion and pandemonium really we rally Women and husbands, their wares, hurried like thieves at night Running for their dear lives and accepting the bulk a faith they put was right As she buried her belly in the brackish algae impure port pier Married to the place for the moment that was her abode She seemed equipped like a seasoned fisherman who knew the Ways of the high waters battle tested again and again And then we all accepted her rescue and counted our gain Families boarding, carrying cook pots, charcoal and grain Her credentials certified declared, faces lit with grins As she set sail hasty euphoric youths gulp, gurgle gin When we offered our prayers they went to the empty skies but Her deck instead assured abundance that what was Bodily presence was cherished, was a plus No matter what you touched before your very senses If anything to put it bluntly your very eyes to see The high seas lulled before her a waiting welcome For she had conquered every tide near and wide With these tales being told she looms like Yemeya* Gently rocking from side to side we were possessed With awe the royal posture of her station Stared down her subjects broad with intimidation We readied ourselves for the seas leaving behind a charred city Bulk would lead her ducklings bringing her mother’s touch – her audacity Thrilled we sang thunderously our trumpets louder than Jericho’s army The Anthem of our beloved pillaged fatherland went crescendo The partisan Lone star forever on Montserrado Verdant heights chests and fists pumped with bravado Our lungs punctured with joyous feelings benign much ado As she sailed away hurt feelings fervent for the city we love Faded like a minute organism that now needed a fine Microscope to capture the once buoyant place – we high On our own impulses onward we rolled sighs Of relieved eminent and virtual strangers who otherwise Would not have spoken exchanged Salutes and high fives our jaws stretching proud From east to west like rainbows decorating the cloud Our hands extending upwards entreating our voices loud All of this before the damn ship began to leak like a barrel When we were suddenly stranded in the middle of nowhere *Yemeya is the Yoruba Orisha or Goddess of the living Ocean April 1996 Copyright © Ralph Geeplay Dafur In their faces their stories are told The distant look that blares cold Haunting eyes begging for mercy fold While bare diplomats mount The days in the Big Apple they count Their words carefully as cameras smolder Speeches flow like the Nile as if Kilimanjaro would erupt But today she was raped by these corrupt Marauding band of zealots Loyal to a God they have never seen he joins The chorus pounding the rostrum with fist he continues A vain rage dressed in a suit tailored by Sean John The rag she wears has not seen soap In more then six months and her belly Thirst for a mere plain porridge soup He saves no lives today or yesterday this big shot The next minute around the corner he stops Still filled from lunch he orders a big Mac Its grease and cheese flows like a faucet he chases it down with coke he sighs and takes another bite His giant stomach obtrudes the seat belt Of his Volvo pressed to the earth Fighting for space to hold on to his breath Slows the pump that clogs his arteries damned How soon he forgot the cries of those mothers And babies whose cause He just championed when the Cameras on C-Span shone like a comet is the irony But in this hot dry arid land dirt clings to her face While flies swarm her mouth as her Grieving mother sits paralyzed tears running down Her cheeks making tears through a marked grime face Poked like a hunter makes a trail in the forest In the corner she howls her shoulders heave Uncontrollably for the husband who never came Home last night because the Al Bashir militias Slaughtered him like a sheep as if for a religious festival In the cold dry night leaving him for vultures His blood soaking the sands while we go about Our quiet ways Darfur burns with infamy untold In their faces their stories are told Mayhem reigns supreme and bold Unreasoning undeterred unashamed On a throne and only worthless Outrage greets the suffering of peoples Of innocent Negros their flesh turns to bones Their bones to skeletons Their skeletons to mud their tears Long dried they can no longer cry Because of the silence of men Who preach morality only when Normandy and Bosnia beckons but hushed When Kigali, Dafur, Monrovia, Freetown blazed We swallow our sorrows and bow our heads in shame When celebrities return begging To the indifferent ears of politicians Copyright © Ralph Geeplay The Neda of Iran 2009 How can we forget the Neda of Tehran On a street corner she made a name As we watch with the mullahs a fame She would never taste it was useless In death she rose like the sphinx Tweeting her way to our hearts and homes jinx For daring to implore the same good old Queries a generation before yet still Her front the triumph of human will Barring none on a cold chilly Saturday of a young woman Who beneath her veil wrestled Wanting to feel the breeze Run through her curls and do --- so her Children might live free from bullets To what was her forlorn axis Or the voice says well that human Course is bound by barring credo and color And while she finished before our eyes With hers gazing unknowingly Staring blankly into ours her voice Quieted plainly by her own blood in Tehran Solemn flash of innocence bath those streets Fervor crowned men she hapless like a gambler Death dealt a waft gullible launch Like a boxing match the final knock out punch Came unwary she defenseless – if only she knew Copyright © Ralph Geeplay Sonnet: When You Get It There’s a rose on the table For you I left it there Hopefully when you get it You might come around and see That life is but a walking trail That love shines like a thousand chandeliers But it too does have its own trials When you get this Find yourself a nice corner seat and smell The sweet flower and it might gel The deep breath you take You must give back, restore and now tell Me if life and love aren’t about give and take I hope this rings a bell I will be waiting for you in Kakata . . . Copyright © Ralph Geeplay http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1903 A Letter to Doeba Bropleh Courtesy of Doeba Bropleh Dear Doeba: All the thanks belong to you because you are the writer.  I see talent in you that needs nurturing.  You are doing well to consider suggestions from me and Stephanie. Revision is the essence of writing. Only the writer who sees the need to go over his or her work again and again can make great accomplishments in the field. Read the average book in the library, you will see in the acknowledgement that many people helped the writer to put together the material. All the credit goes to the writer. Continue writing. Set aside an hour or two to devote to it. One day you will produce a work of great importance. I myself need an editor. Stephanie has been helpful to me. Any time you write something and want me to see it, send it to me for my comments. I advise that you don't have to take every suggestion people give you. Perhaps the technical side you can accept. All writers must go by the rules of their trade. But you know in your heart what you want to say. Other people’s reactions can put you on your guard to see where you need improvement.  Sometimes it is good for you to read the type of story you want to write as written by other writers. I wish you success in this thankless job. Once God has put in your heart the desire to write, you have to do it to the best of your ability. Our country is torn apart; only intelligence will build it back again. We are the spokespersons of our people, we have to work hard. God bless! Sincerely yours, Wilton Sankawulo Sr. November 2, 2007 http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1976 We Departed Our Homelands and We Came . . . -- Grebo Saying We departed our homelands and we came, so the Grebo say, we came with our hands and we came with our machetes so we too, could carve up the new land. When we left home, we crossed streams and we climbed up hills; we set out through wet brushes, and the rivers parted so we could cross. We know that if the leopard should leap, it is because it sees an antelope passing. We came, not so we could sit and watch a wrestling match, not so we could watch the land on which our feet walk, rise beyond our reach. We journeyed from our homelands, and we came, so, let it be known that we left our homelands, and we came. When we arrived, we dug up the earth, and in this new earth, we laid down our umbilical cords, forever. So let it be known among the people– we left all the beauty of our homelands not so we would sit out on The Mat to wail. Biography When the Wanderers Come Home This is where we were born in these corrugated rugged places, where boys chasing girls chasing boys chasing other girls chasing bellies chasing babies chasing other babies chasing poverty, chased death. Of potholed streets and bars and sex and other girls getting drowned forever and ever in loveless love. And then the fires of our lives lit other fires of other lives with lust and then there was no longer us. So then the war came with its bullets chasing people chasing the bombs, and ghost towns sprang up with carcasses of the dying and the dead. And like mushrooms, the dead rose up to claim the land and we were no more. But the fires still burned in the wombs and in the eyes of the city streets below which the dead lovers and love lie. And there was life again out of so much pain, and life took on its own life again and the girls returned on the backs of surreal horses in search of that old fire. But these were no longer the same girls or boys or men or women. But this is where we grew up on these sidewalk streets, in these rugged places. This is where the streets come in. This is where we belong. This is where life begins. “Biography When the Wanderers Come Home” was previously published in The Literary Review, Winter 2009 Issue My Mother Came to Visit Me Last Night In the fading dusk, the skies, bleeding orange-red, and Mama standing there, in her lappa and bubba suit, of pure wax. The lappa, so neatly wrapped about her, she could have been alive still. But the bubba’s sleeves, flying in the ocean breeze, its butterfly wings, as if in preparation for taking off like a plane, as if for the afterlife. As if to say, “I am not here to stay, my daughter, I am not here to stay in these your spoiled spaces.” Her baby-lappa, wrapped so neatly about her waist, taking over the mother-lappa, and Mama looked like someone on a long journey by foot. In my arms, I carried a small child even as I walked up the path to meet my mother at the front of what was supposed to be my home. The house with its wide sandy front yard near the beach somewhere in Monrovia’s Sinkor. And in that place,  a few people stood around as if this were truly Monrovia again, as if this were again the life my mother knew before her passing. Mama held out her arms to take the child from me even though I could not see her face even as I looked at her face. I could not see the child’s face or tell if it was a girl or a boy, if it was my child or another woman’s. The wiggling child, wary, of a Grandma, coming out of thin air. This woman was real, I told myself. “My Mama,” I cried, imagining Mama’s sparkling, dark eyes, her small gap teeth, her arms, swinging, the way my mother used to move, telling one story or the other. Her brown skin, aging, her way of laughing as if each laugh were a broken piece of log upon air bubbles, a long hard laugh, broken into small, chunky pieces, blocks of laughter- as if her life depended on laughter and humor, song and dance. She was my mother, for sure, poking fun at everyone as they stared in disbelief  at Mama in my dream world. I stood there, watching my mother, who could make a full room laugh until tears strained down the corners of everybody’s eyes. Mama stood in the doorway, in my open, dream doorway, looking on the inside. She would not come with me inside the house or give back the child to me. They say, the dead may not come inside the house in a dream. In a dream, the dead cannot give themselves up to the living. In a dream, one cannot hold their dead mother's hand or look into her face or give a handshake or kola nuts in welcome. The dead must visit with the living only from the outside. Copyright © Patricia Jabbeh Wesley http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1945 Johnny Mad Dog, Or, Telling Someone Else’s Story “Africa's pain, invisibility, misconception. One's living it all the time. Not just the media perception of it, but in terms of individual lives - the stuff you see in people's eyes. How Africa's perceived; how we perceive, and fail to perceive, one another." – Ben Okri We spend the afternoon watching a movie downloaded from a site on the Internet . . . just the two of us, we, witnesses of the beginning. The two of us, who had fled Sinkor one evening, who had lived in Congo Town for a while, then took refuge on Randall Street. The two of us, pushed to the evacuating helicopter in Mamba Point, under shooting, on that foggy morning, who rode it to Freetown, where we were sure we would never reach. At that time, my son was nine years old. Now he is 27 . . . He downloaded that film because he saw it was about the war, about Liberia. So, we start watching it: Johnny Mad Dog. It takes us back there right away. Monrovia  in war time! It is all there. All of it. The empty streets in the sun, the people fleeing, the groups of commando children, with guns, going around, harassing and swearing. The very painfully characteristic scenes: children forced to enter the force, shooting their parents first; other children trying to take care of sick parents, of each other, hiding in deserted buildings. Again, the bullet proofing ritual that came across as an extreme only by the fact that the film showed something belonging to the legacy of silence . . . A love scene without love, a rape scene, some human feeling communicated by the leader of the group to that girl he protected and to whom he finally returned . . . the melodramatic perspective: the group of commandos, dressed grotesquely, with guns in the air, dancing and singing. The same group harassing a pair of elders, ignoring their pleading for some sense, ready to shoot them for their belongings . . . One of the most heart-breaking scenes of the war: the fighting for food: a woman savagely dragged away and beaten up to leave her bag of rice. All these scenes are worked out in detail: in setting, in acting, in the use of Liberian English. All these scenes are ordered in such a manner as to increase dramatics and show a detailed picture of the war fought by a small team of children, led by Mad Dog, with all the characteristic situations such groups had encountered. The city is there too, now shaking from the roar of guns, now deserted and silenced by threats and horrors. And yet, the two of us are searching for something else, which is not there. We are stubbornly looking for it all the while. We see how the children are betrayed by those they trust. We see how the children are used, tricked, lied to, trapped. But it is not enough. When the film ends, we are both left with a question mark. The film was well documented and even awarded recognition at the Film Festival in Cannes. The director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire had lived for a time with the children acting in the film. The story was drawn from the well-written 2005 novel, Johnny Mad Dog, by Congolese writer, Emmanuel Dongala. It did, it did present a small segment of people, the child commandos, involved in specific situations; so then, what was the “something else” we were expecting? “And yet, something is not there!” He was quite categorical in his remark. He was a witness of the beginning of the war; he lived it at the age of nine, when he lost his father, his home, his family, his brothers and sisters in Liberia, his Liberian background, everything that made up a homeland for him . . . We agree that it must have been quite a task to isolate those episodes from the overall picture of the war. Following the segments of a small group of child commandos through their actions, and at the same time presenting some of the roughest experience they went through, must have taken an enormous effort of concentration. However, such isolation has another effect on viewers, especially on those who had not lived through the war: they are led to believe that people are like what they see. This impression could have been harnessed from the beginning, by detailing the background. That of the people. It could have added more drama and could have shown what the war had done to the people, to groups, to families, and individuals. It could have explained what made these children become such commandos from what they had been before. We too were looking for that background… The children fighting war, wandering through the streets of Monrovia, among deserted buildings . . . it leaves viewers with the impression of uselessness, a useless, melodramatic fight. They act what they had seen before and act it seriously: the game of war and death is serious. What about the other bits of the overall picture? The reactions to the movie must be of all sorts. Ours has been one of extreme bitterness and emptiness: the people are not like that and this is not the whole picture. However, the perspectives of filmmakers differ along with the intention in the approach of the theme. We were certain that a film of this type, directed by a Liberian filmmaker, would have been different, richer, with a different spirit . . . I also remember a book I had seen on sale years before, entitled Massacre in Monrovia. I grabbed it from the shelf of the bookstore and started reading through it feverishly. On the pages I managed to run across, Charles Taylor was talking to one of his men, then took his rifle and left. The fragment I read was so “colorless”, it had nothing of the so-called local color, it had no intensity, it had nothing to justify the presence of such a strong character, from a literary point of view. The text was dry: no impression was left on the reader. It seemed as if someone had told the story to the writer, who put it on paper, without providing it the necessary “flavor” . . . My reaction to Johnny Mad Dog was the same: an undefined, yet essential element that was missing from it, changing the whole story into an account of useless savagery, even though it did touch on the major dramas of the war. These reactions trigger one question I openly ask readers-writers especially, those who witnessed the war in Liberia: how easy is it to write about the war? What does it take to provide readers with a detailed picture of those events? Those who write about this theme put their own experience on paper. All these are bits of the big picture of the historical episode, whether they are short stories, poems, novels, articles, essays etc. We should also take into account the fact that some of the masterpieces of world literatures were written during the period of the world wars, usually by those people who directly witnessed the events. And those are the real stories . . . Our prestigious Liberian writer Vamba Sherif once said that Liberians still write about the war.  They will. They will continue writing about it for a long time, as it has marked not only those generations that were part of it, but it will carry on its effects across future generations. They will continue writing on the war, but they should not give their stories to others to tell. The impression and effects will turn out to be different from their own. And the world will see the picture, but will not have any idea about that difference which so much counts. Those of us who were there, in those times, should tell about those events, as we have the spirit of the time so alive in our souls and writing. Let us unveil it then, but not only the main line of events, but also those details that have made them history for a lifetime. Thus we give chance to what Nigerian writer Ben Okri has formulated more explicitly than I could do it here, so I quote: “It is not loss that defines us, but recovery. One has to read the clues of what seems to be lost, in art, artifacts, intuitions, dreams. The artist is a conduit through which lost things are recovered.” Copyright © Eva Acqui http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1836 “She walked on worlds”: Intertexualizing Myth, Sexuality and Class in DuBois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and The Souls of Black Folk “She walked on worlds, and worlds of worlds, and heard there in her little room the tread of armies, the paeans of victory, the breaking of hearts, and the music of the spheres.” from, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, W.E.B DuBois I broach this investigation of myth, sexuality and class within the context of post-American Reconstruction, particularly as it relates to African Americans and their struggle against Western interpretations of mythology, sex and class distinctions. This critical analysis is a paucity, a small contribution in terms of examining how these socio-cultural signals are rooted against an African diasporic tradition that has largely gone unnoticed, even after slavery ended and American Reconstruction began its violent start. Merriam-Webster defines American Reconstruction as the “reorganization and reestablishment of the seceded states in the Union after the Civil War” (20) and yet many African Americans were excluded from this “reorganizing,” “reestablishing” process. During this volatile period in U.S. history the stakes were enormously high for a nation newly removed from a long history of African enslavement in the New World. Most criticism and literature, with the exception of a few, curtailed any profound dissection on how the admixture of race, sex, class and mythology were inextricably linked to a Union and Confederate alliance. Instead of forging discussions on how to improve national division, (post)-American Reconstruction served as a vehicle to continue most forms of myth-rooted separatism. Fortunately, many literatures and criticisms about various aspects surrounding the collision of class, sex and myth, as they related to race, surfaced. Writing composed by African Americans during this time was focused on disengaging old notions about formerly enslaved blacks.  Aristotelian questions about the nature and reason of life surfaced in many ways. African American critical and literary writers launched subsequent movements that encouraged the involvement of African Americans in the political narrative thread of American literary, critical history. Mythologies surrounding African Americans during and after Reconstruction was a major factor in white on black sexual violence and lynching; moreover, there existed a ninety-percent poverty rate for blacks at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was pressing due to a socio-cultural amnesia regarding the atrocities of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its influence on creating socially misguided myths about non-Whites. The socio-cultural erasure that erupted out of a collective slave past that surfaced in ways were often disturbing and anathema to a larger conversation that corroborated indices of racial, sexual and economic egalitarianism. Nationalistic tendencies before, during and after American Reconstruction were located within hermetic spaces. These closed terrains were relegated to specific definitions of who was and who was not defined as American. What this period of nationalism has shown, and I define nationalism within the confines of white heterosexual Judeo-Christian hegemonic patriarchalism, is the profound exclusion of movements or ideologies that greatly contrast a Western phenomena of nationhood. This essay seeks to unearth a small part of this erasure as told through the critical and creative lens of selected literature and criticism by W.E.B DuBois. DuBois, a germinal and influential writer and critic of Western modes of class, sexual, mythological and racial identities, expanded narrow unproductive discourses bent on keeping non-Western notions in a state of subjugation. DuBois’s critical and creative life highlighted gaps and holes in Western discourse that subjected non-Westerns to classist, sexist, mythological invisibility and alienation. DuBois returned to these discourses constantly; his cyclical visitations and profound rhetoric of uplift allowed the world to see the prostrate position of excluded nations. DuBois was well aware of these competing discourses and put his literary and critical oeuvre at the service of a new type of inter-discourse that elevated previously misguided scholastic understandings of the West versus the non-West. DuBois’s dialectic was one of the first to synthesize competing ideas of the West and “the Other.”  He was one of the first great black scholars to construct a schema that employed and merged sociological, literary, and historical inquiries to find solutions to myth-based racism, sexism and classism.  DuBois’s two major works, written during post-Reconstruction, The Souls of Black (1903) and The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) highlight his desire to marry differences in competing notions of myth, sexuality and class. The essay from which this section is excerpted is available in entirety in PDF file format: click to download [1] [1] http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/blog/wp-content/images/NOV2009/CARRZA_DUBOSE_Dubois_ESSAY.pdf http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1983 The Poet As Sculptor and Other Thoughts On Writing Poetry I have learned from attending writers’ workshops over the years that a poet is a sculptor. Some of the best teachers I have had include Maya Angelou, Allan Ginsberg, and Jerome Judson.  They taught me that a freshly composed poem is like a block of marble or a large piece of wood that must be chiseled and carved until it reaches a shape of perfection that pleases the eye. Similarly with a raw poem, you chisel away excess words until you reach a form that is concise, concrete, and conveys meaning in brief, vivid phrases that evoke a response in the reader. I have attended writers’ workshops in the past - the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference  at Middlebury College in Vermont,  the Cuyahoga Writers’ Workshop, Cuyahoga, Ohio, and the Geneva Writers’ Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, and I  have been a member of writers’ groups wherever I live—the USA, Liberia, and now Switzerland; there is always something new to learn, and the workshop experience stimulates and sharpens a writer’s mind. The poet as sculptor continues to seek perfection and works towards becoming the Michelangelo of poetry. Michelangelo lived with a stonecutter and his wife and family in the town where his father owned a marble quarry and a small farm. At thirteen, he was apprenticed to a painter and later took up sculpturing. In every profession, we begin as apprentices. We learn the basics before we use them to interpret and apply those innate sensibilities with which we enter this world.  Sometimes these intuitive ideas are misplaced, or they lie dormant until they are awoken by someone else, or they are ignored by creative souls who refuse to acknowledge their existence. There are also those who allow arrogance to stifle their talent by refusing to accept the guidance and wisdom of those more experienced. The artist/poet, gifted or learned, must first study the elements of poetry which allow them to analyze their own work and that of others.  It is necessary for the poet/learner to examine these tools to see how they work or function.  After that, he or she can decide which tools are necessary to shape the ideas they set down on paper and communicate to others. Some will refer to this process as finding your own voice. The elements of poetry are like the sculpturing tools to a sculptor, the wood carving tools to the wood carver. All great poetry have these elements, ancient or modern, no matter where found in the world, whether oral or written. The elements are: 1. Alliteration: two or more words which have the same initial sound. 2. Assonance: a partial rhyme which has the same internal vowel sounds amongst different words. 3. Metaphor: a comparison which does not use the words "like" or "as". 4. Onomatopoeia: words that sound like their meaning, for example, "buzz", "moo", "pow". 5. Repetitions: the repetition of the same word or sound throughout the poem to emphasize significance (purposeless repetition, however, detracts from a poem). 6. Rhyme: the repetition of sounds within different words, either at the end, middle or beginning (though rhyming just for the sake of rhyming is a put off for readers). 7. Rhythm: the flow of words within each meter and stanza. 8. Simile: a comparison using the words “like” or “as”. 9. Style: the way the poem is written in freestyle, ballad, haiku, etc. Includes length of meters, number of stanzas along with rhyme techniques and rhythm. 10. Symbol: something that represents something else through association, resemblance or convention. 11. Theme: the message, point of view and idea of the poem. During our general education, some of us are taught the elements of poetry; others are not. Aspiring poets should take it upon themselves, as seekers of knowledge, to study them and apply them to the molding of thoughts which give to the ordering of polished words full of meaning and message that tug at our senses. The process of writing can be quick. It is possible to have a great moment of inspiration and find the right words to communicate a feeling, an idea, an experience. On the other hand and more often, writers might need several revisions over time to find the right words to share that experience he/she feels compelled to impart to others. A writers’ group is the perfect testing board for the gem you feel you have produced. Writers are great at pointing out those imperfections which your own eyes and familiarity fail to detect. There is nothing like honest, constructive criticism. You, the writer, might go home with your ego deflated, but the desire to publish keeps you on the right path. Self-proclaimed writers who cannot accept constructive criticism will not grow nor get published. A serious writer must be willing to learn, have fresh ideas, must be disciplined, patient, be willing to accept disappointment, and then success will extend its hand. Copyright © 2009 Althea Romeo-Mark http://www.liberiaseabreeze.com/archives/1917