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ESIABA IROBI

 

The Kingdom of the Mad

    (for B.J. alias Biodun Jeyifo) 



I



B. J., as you know,  poetry, 

        for all exiles, 

     begins in Flight. 



The British Airways plane hovered over Lagos, 

like a wounded albatross, then, headed North, towards 

Ibadan, emitting its jets of smoke over smaller cities:



Ife, Ondo, Abeokuta, Ekiti, and the green forests, 

the markets, rivers, lakes, valleys, plains, mountains 

and the smouldering savannahs of the hunch-backed  



landscape we once called our country;



over the kingdom of the mad, and its greedy, 

corrupt populace grinning gangrenously, below, 

like wounds on a punctured, suppurating heart;



over Nigeria, a fiction on the edge of extinction.



It jetted round the neck of Olumo Rocks

like a curse, straightened its neck, blessed the skull

of the earth with its urine-streaked droppings,



then, banked westwards, its iron wings 

scizzoring the wind and the clouds and the light with fury

like a hurricane nicknamed the tail of the devil. 



Airborne, now,  I look down.  How secure 

and powerful it makes one feel to look down, 

from these heights, and see one's own country 

and people as damned,  see them as toothed vulvas 

waiting to bite off  and chew into pieces whatever 

you put like a bone between their gaping, yapping, 

flapping, oversized, omnivorous lips: food, foolishness, 

manifestoes, your penis,  even urine from an aeroplane, 

raining down their open-ended throats like a sad, 

lugubrious poetry ; the poetry of power… 

And suddenly, it dawns on me that this must be 

what it feels like, I mean the ecstasy of  power. This is what 

seduces us all. This feeling that one can soar above it all, 



and feed on it, alone, like a gifted vulture, 

like our late president who, it has now been confirmed,  

died from an overdose of viagra pills. 



Had esoteric tastes in women. Every hue and colour. Every shade 

and shape. Every style. Every position. Including `The wheelbarrow'

which dumped him into his shallow worm-cushioned grave. 



And so , B.J., from the comfort of this seat, 



empowered by the cheap red wine, 

the distance, the height, the British Council fellowship, 

and, the dazzling, blinding light, 



the country spreads out below like the carcass 

of a gigantic cow rotting in the sun, its future, a capsized canoe 

on the ox-bow loops of the river Niger crawling below.



I survey all, like Ozymandias, and smile. 



One day, this country will explode, 

with a terrifying  force, 

the force with which the engines, 

like the imagination, rage 

against the fuselage's and the wings' 

craving for the earth and gravity.

It will explode! In the hands and faces 

of its makers. It will explode! Like a crude Biafran bomb!



  II



And now, as the plane begins its cruise, in high altitude, 

across the sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, towards the tropic 

of cancer, towards England, on a clear September day

I take a final glance at what was once my country, 

and sigh, as all exiles always do, and begin to sing, inwardly,

without words, in all the colours of sorrow, about the destiny  



of my country and of all exiles like me, who leave never to return:  





I spit upon the laws that thieves have made

To give the crooked the strength to rob the straight.

I spit upon a country so full of wealth

Yet millions wallow in squalor and in want.

I spit upon the flag that flaps like a rag

On an iron pole  planted on the vision of pregnant generals.

I spit upon rabid religions that defend a hell on earth

and preach a heaven beyond this  mire

I spit upon the education that turns into stenographers

A generation that could have been philosophers

visionaries and revolutionaries. Upon this whole damned

nation  of mine do I spit. And while I spit, I weep.



III



Join me, B. J.  in this epic of a cynic, 

our nation's nunc dimitis, my ballad 

for her rigor mortis, which I  sing 

on my way into exile, and while I sing I weep.



Join me, with your baritone, brandy-mellowed voice,

even from across the Atlantic, from the other shore littered 

with exiles, like  beautiful seashells on a tourist beach. 



Join me. I didn't know you too had fled.

Some omniscient African-American egghead at Harvard told me. 

B.J. I can hear you from here.  My sorrow is oceanic. 



Join me from Cornell! Nothing will stand between

You and me and the pain of history this song contains:

The cruelties of history. The fangs of our history,



As sharp as the jaws of the desert 

and vast as the Sahara. As deep as the Atlantic

which, now, cannot stand between us 



and our demon song! So, B.J., join me 

in this Booger Dance before the cortege arrives 

and we become  another shard amidst a pile 



of shattered shards in an exploding continent.



And do you notice, B.J., how, as one escapes 

further away from the boundaries of our nation, 

the surreal reel of the iniquities of our history 

begin to unfold faster and faster in the memory  

like slides from Shoah? B.J. do you realize as you read,

that I am what I have always been: a student of holocausts,

a scholar of genocides, a professor of pogroms; 

a research assistant of exterminations,  ethnic cleansing 

and all other exciting atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries…



IV



Ah,  my compatriot, B.J., do you remember the beauties  

of nineteen sixty-six exhibited as  the masterpieces of our history 

in the galleries of the North? Do you or do you not?



The human heads baked in an oven before they were fed to dogs.

The female breasts sliced off with axes and scimitars. 

The vaginas and male genitals scalped with rusty scizzors;



The spoils of an incestuous war. * Skulls trepanned

with swinging axes. Necks chopped off on auction blocks. 

Eyes roasted  like groundnuts before they were fed to vultures 



and other fowls of the air. * The human brains 

used to repaint the dirty asphalt of the one road 

we have traveled since nineteen sixty-six.*



Corpses tipped into mass graves, some left to the caress 

of hyenas, the delight of vultures and the phalanges of the wind. 

The valley growing with bones and rotting flesh.* 



The bodies of little children floating down the river, 

clutching , like tiny green-white-green flags, the fragments 

of our future. * Do you recall the memory of the Igbo woman 



who brought home, like a trophy, in a suitcase, 

across River Benue, across the river Niger, by donkey 

and by  bicycle, by head and by train, 



the quartered pieces of her husband's body. * 

It is happening again, B.J., it is happening again.



At the turn of a new and doubtful century, 

it is happening again and of course, you sef can see 

how we have been standing here for half a century , 



knee-deep in ashes, like embalmed sentinels, 

waiting  for the sign of a new life, any green thing 

that can sprout from this valley blooming with bones,



blooming, like Malagatanas paintings,  with its harvest of skulls.  



V



Yes, B.J., the iniquities of our history will shame Mosseley, 

shame Mussolini, shame Hitler, shame Enoch Powell, shame the Roman Arena, shame Carthage, shame  Rwanda, shame even History herself.



I spit upon the laws that thieves have made

To give the crooked the strength to rob the straight.

I spit upon a country so full of wealth

Yet millions wallow in squalor and in want.

I spit upon the flag that flaps like a rag

Above an excrement  of pregnant generals

And the new monkeys with the conductor's stick. 

Upon this whole damned nation of mine

do I spit. And while I spit, I weep.



Look at them, B.J.: The whirling dervishes of our history, politicians 

of the third and final republic, with their spin doctors 

and dream makers, sorcerers and shrinks all spinning round 

and round like the possessed prophets of Baal, 

stabbing themselves, cutting up their bodies, out of whose holes 

nothing flows, neither blood nor water, nor any juices 

of the spirit, since these animals are meat, mere meat,

fit only to be barbecued  or roasted or baked or even cremated.

I mean the leaders. Since they are by their nature, toxins, 

inedible, and for the sake of their immediate humanity, 

should be handcuffed, shaved, upstairs and downstairs, 

put in a leaking boat and pushed into the Atlantic Ocean, 

where they will find, among the monsters of the deep,

the bones and relics of their ilk,

snorkeling among the ocean floor, among 

the polyps and corals , the skeletons of a drowning history! 

Here they come again. Here they come! Look at them. B.J.,

International Thief Thiefs. See their eyes? And their stinking arses, 

their balding patches and trembling eyelids, (See, they are making 

juju with their eyes  now) puckered faces and leprous hands cradling 

their crystal balls,  their luminescent balls. Hear their grand epics, 

their chants and great incantations…The prisons have been emptied, 

the parliaments are full…The donkeys are neighing, the horses braying, 

the bulldogs roaring,  the hyenas throwing up…Meanwhile the hen 

returns to roost  without her brood of chicks because a python  lies 

at the threshold,  his stomach bulging with eggs and the bones 

of the only cockerel left. The compound walls are falling. 

Creepers crawl over  our homestead.

But I continue to sing, 

B.J., because, as you know so well,  it is only the homing pigeon 

who has left the loft  and journeyed forth, and returned, bloodied 

and brained  in the skull,  pebbled in wing and beak,

who recites anew the myth of the land.



VI

Join me Odia Ofeimun, you who were once a poet,

a fine poet, whose favourite poet  is himself .

You promised us , at the Anthill,  to write us an epic titled:

Go Tell the Generals. Where is that great epic?



Who are the publishers? Why do I not have it in my hands?

Reciting it like a mantra  with a rage and an energy 

close to violence could have saved me this labour, 

this despair, since I know the power of your gifted hand.



Odia, where is that great epic? Or have you  published 

and launched it between the thighs of a thousand white women 

across whose smiling thighs, thumping groins and 

applauding pelvises we all seem only able  to writhe these days?



Join me Benjamin Okri, you who refused to send me a little money 

out of the Booker prize to pay my rent in Liverpool.

Ah, the brotherhood of man. My bank manager was looking

for me all over Liverpool with a shot gun and two men

wielding lead pipes at the time I sent that SOS. 

So join me in this incantation that wards off evil spirits at home 

or in exile: In London or at Cambridge. The flames of the torches 

we once carried in our hands are now succulent scallops 

in which the wind dips his magic tongue again and again 

and smiles and smacks  his lips  so redolent with sweet pussyjuice.



Join me Femi Osofisan, from your office in Ibadan.

As I told you at Leeds, the Monsters of the Deep 

are still feeding on my soul like the teeth of a thousand 

piranhas. Femi, I hope when I die,  someone will stand 

at my graveside and recite  with a tremulous voice, 

this  epitaph: We have gathered here today, in Aba 

to mourn a stubborn poet called Esiaba, who deeply believed 

that there comes a time in every poet's career when he or she must

have the guts to call a cunt a cunt even if it is his own fucked-up cuntry. 



I spit upon a country so full of wealth. Yet millions wallow

in squalor and in want. I spit upon the flag that flaps like a rag

above the kingdoms of the mad. And while I spit, Femi,  I weep….

Kole , I hear you are now in South Africa. 

Doing great adverts for mobile phones from the USA.

How will Karl Marx feel in his grave now that you appear

On billboards for conglomerates, how will Trotsky feel? 

Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao, how will they fee