To America with poetry

The 2014 colloquium was the fifth of the annual intellectual and cultural gathering and the first held after the death of its founder, Professor Chinua Achebe, while serving as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of African Studies in the Department of Africana Studies of Brown University, Rhode Island, Providence, United States. […]

The 2014 colloquium was the fifth of the annual intellectual and cultural gathering and the first held after the death of its founder, Professor Chinua Achebe, while serving as the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of African Studies in the Department of Africana Studies of Brown University, Rhode Island, Providence, United States.
So important is Achebe’s work, as a writer and culture advocate, that Simon Gikandi, the Kenyan scholar and Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, credited him with “the invention of African culture” – as the author of the novel Things Fall Apart, which won global respect for African culture and earned respectful worldwide readership for African literature, besides his other novels, poems and polemical writings by which he makes a courageous case for the respectability of African literature, art and culture – as well as the dignity and humanity of the African – and ultimately succeeds as symbolised by the adoption into the Western canon of one of such writings, the classic “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”.
And the Achebe colloquium is in a sense a forum for exploring dialogue – a vital part of the African way of life – as a means of resolving social issues and engendering development. The Igbo, from whom Achebe sprung, have “Nkolika” (which roughly translates as “dialogue is supreme”) as one of their given names for the female child. And I saw in the 2014 Chinua Achebe Colloquium the trappings of a forum whose founder might have established to promote the Igbo – in fact African – culture of utilitarian dialogue and emphasise its transcendence, its supremacy in comparison to other forms of intercourse practiced by humans.    
Achebe, who died at 82 on March 21, 2013, founded the colloquium as a forum for leaders, politicians, scholars, artists, etc., from Africa and other parts of the world, to discuss serious issues about Africa and how their resolution could improve the lot of the continent and its peoples, while fostering progress in other parts of the world with which the destiny of Africa is inextricably linked. So, like the typical offering from Achebe as a writer and an innovative thinker, the colloquium seeks to create a synthesis between precepts and action, between ideas and development; for, as Achebe reminded us in his striking articulation of the Igbo philosophy of the duality and complementarity of things: “Nothing stands alone. If one thing stands, another stands by it.”
The 2014 colloquium, held in Brown University from May 2-3, 2014, had the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria as one of the subjects for discussion, an issue that currently threatens the stability of Africa’s most populous nation, which continues to attract anxious global attention to Nigeria, the importance of whose quick resolution to Nigeria, Africa and the world cannot be overstated. However, the main theme was “African Literature as Restoration: Chinua Achebe as Teacher”, a theme that resonates with part of Achebe’s life work in restoring – in fact, securing – the place of African literature in the global scheme literary appreciation, a task he accomplished as a writer and a teacher of the merits of African literature to Africans and non-Africans alike. Achebe saw this as his overriding mission as a writer, as he revealed in the following comment about himself and his fellow African literature pioneers from his memoir, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra: “… it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories – prose, poetry and essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.” 
The 2014 Chinua Achebe Colloquium brought together a transnational body of scholars, officials from the United Nations, North America, African governments, the European Union, and other organisations for two days of intense deliberation and exchange of ideas on the significance of art, literature and culture.
Brown University, with the support of its staff and President, Christina H. Paxson, provided excellent hospitality for the participants, I inclusive, and an institution whose grand and serene mix of antique, classical and modern ambiences offered perhaps the best setting for such an intercourse of ideas.    
Ms. Paxson’s official invitation complemented by another from the Achebe family had ensured that I broke a long jinx in securing a visa for what was in fact my first visit to the United States – as a poet, to perform “No Dirge for Achebe”, one of my poems I regard as very special owing to its unique features, and a product of customised inspiration by Achebe. 
Among those features is the paradox of the poem being an elegy that is not a dirge, one that mourns by celebrating its subject and his works as though in a reversible mode. Another is its induction of a long retinue of Igbo musical instruments into that “mournful” celebration.
The udu, one of the instruments, is shaped like the traditional clay pot for storing drinking water among the Igbo, called udu mmiri, but with a hole big enough for the insertion an adult’s hand on its spherical body. Its sound is onomatopoeic, mimics its name. The ikoro, a huge, carved wooded drum with a hollow interior, weighed nearly 70 kilograms. It produces a range of booming sounds. The ogele, the metal gong, produces a merry sound. The versatile oja flute, made famous in world fiction by Unoka, a character in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, can produce a wide range of sounds that are in turns cheerful, sad, sharp, dull, slow or quick, drawing on its handler’s skill. The ekwe, a miniature version of the ikoro, produces a dry, hollow, wooden sound, while the igba, the drum, with its moderate barrel-like body and taut-skin top, produces a thumping or thrilling sound that can be made slow or racy by its player according to need.
And I supported by Ngozi Michel Osuji, a traditional instrumentalist and my assistant on the American artistic expedition, in weaving all the musical instruments into various stages of an organic poetry performance, as in the following third and fourth stanzas of the poem in which the sound of each instrument follows its invocation during performance: “I shall sing with the udu;/The ikoro shall boom with my song;/The ogele shall lend me a merry tone;/The oja shall stand by me weaving in melodious strains;/The ekwe’s notes of solidarity shall be mine for the asking;/The igba shall back my song with jerking throbs of its mystic sounds.