A Heart For All Seasons

Audre Lorde
Warrior, Poet, Mother

For Audre Lorde

If I had a heart for all seasons, 

A heart that perceives

The friend in every person,

Yet will draw out the snitch

For the hype he really is;

A heart that's molded from pure gold

And yet makes room for earth's trash.

Because he believes the best is yet to be told. 

And so it ain't necessary to reheat

The overrated skillet of ash. 

If I had a heart for all seasons,

I'll sacrifice excuses for good reasons,

And guard my heart above all else

Until I generate power to revive dead cells.

A heart that beats in and out of season

A heart with an ear that's quick to lísten

Such a heart is like silver

With a bust of Caesar,

Refined seven times.

A heart that crosses immortal lines. 

Akpan

Cadence Bound

Lightning is faster than its sound

But when that comes its thunder

In words silence goes the round

Before sound wakes up suspended wonder

And make the reader shudder

How does a word absorb sound

Crack its shell to free cadence bound

It's magic that conjures sound

Sorcery that jaunts it thro doors,

Not seen nor foreseen by us,

Cut into the navel of the words

How does sound come into a word

How does rhythm leaven syllable

How does meaning evolve from thought

I am a captive in its vestibule

I’m an albatross

Convolved in a torrent of words.

Akpan

One Piece

I am not one piece of myself

I am the whole fragment

Of a forever cracking shell

I’m forming a knoll of sediment

Refining who I am

Like the cracks on a map

My soul is splinter

Of the Divine

A wicker

Of the supernatural mind

I am all realities

My psyche perceives

Yet I absolve all personalities

Or I’ve been self-deceived.

Akpan

On Identity

If you talk to a man in a language he understands that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

—Nelson Mandela

If you don’t define yourself for yourself, you’ll be crushed into other people’s fantasies of you and be eaten alive.

—Audrey Lorde

My childhood home was the twisted variation of a family guesthouse; we always had some member of a distant family crashing with us. They came and went in a randomized fashion ultimately concocting nature’s own nonpareil interludes. Once, a long time ago, when we were just kids, Sir told my brothers and me, “You ought to make something of a habit out of conversing in your native dialect at home. English of course, should come easy enough in school.” Sir always had one such thing or another to say when he was still around. “It’s vital that you preserve your heritage,” he’d say. “And besides, since I don’t want to play your interpreter when you visit at the village, I would recommend you get the hang of your patois.” ‘Sir’ was what we called our father.

To the relatives we bunked, because he wasn’t their father (though old enough to be for some) and to demonstrate their sense of gratitude and respect, my father became Sir. That is typical Ibibio practice. “Sir” is a monosyllable but we somehow managed to override the laws of phonetics and made the word come out in two syllables. I grew up to observe folks around my home call Father that and I got hooked on it like a drug. Sir didn’t do much by way of setting us straight. I guess he figured it didn’t pretty much matter one way or the other what word repped “father” as long as the attitude clicked.

Sir was a big fan of local dialect—“a man ought to master his own language before any other”—and he stood by his belief until his translation to glory in 1995. (“translation to glory” I think that’s a refined way of depicting death, don’t you?) Through the years, I’ve bumped into sizeable opportunity to reeducate myself on its peculiar and dead level candor. And I make no bones about it but Sir’s opinion makes an intrepid kind of sense.

                The kind that feeds its voice into customs trapped beneath the lid of the coffin of a flung way of life and makes them scream out in a sort of energetic shout that shatters the woodwork like a strong morning light piercing the horizon.

I was a Calabar boy in Lagos. I suppose if you were Nigerian, you’d enjoy poking fun at me about how with those seven words you knew my entire story. Yet, you’d be several miles wide. Looking back, I realize I‘ve always been like an actor in a struggle to identify his role in a play filled with casts who shared apparently similar parts. For me, the idea has been, when my turn comes to make an entrance, not to wind up as an archetype or worse, a flat character. Sir was probably trying to save my brothers and me the unease that trucks with the horde of out-of-placeness among people of our own tribe when he had us learn Ibibio. But you see, when you have to climb life’s ladder while trying to dig three make that four, languages at the same time, the heat is tuned up to the nth degree.

Growing up in Nigeria has not exactly been camping out on Easy Street. I’ve spent a large chunk of my life trying to define who I am in a multi-cultured, multi-layered society. The challenge has not been without its out-of-the-usual-run-of-things type of fun. On the one hand, the Nigerian school system pitched the British English as its official language; on the other hand, I had the American movies, literature and hip-hop that I grew up with. I’m better acquainted with the American version. I even take a sense of pride in the fact that I speak Yoruba to a degree that I make original speakers question my true origin sometimes. But I am the son of my father cause I speak his language; I’ve dipped beneath this black body and fetched up who I am.

A couple of years before, I usually got stuck in a pretty fix when natter shifted to questions regarding my ethnicity. You’d have had to drag the confession out of me with a chainfall. (The unease sprang up from what you’d expect in a society glutted with copious dialects coupled with the reality that my patois was a minority). I’ve had a hard time trying to figure out how exactly I got along way back when I lived in denial—when I’d not yet defined myself for myself to coin a phrase. Then again, another question prays to be tackled. What happened that finally peeled the scales off my eyes and pushed realization, ripe and full across the threshold into where I lived?

Writing happened. You gotta know yourself, know what you stand for to be a writer worth a darn. In my drive to become a better writer, I turned up a knockout identity.

                Yes, writing happened and it introduced me to the sense of who I am, to a sense of place. It’s consumed me with a love for words that’s grown out of a plain desire to express the me of myself to a life-long dream to write anew the details of this macrocosm through the novelty of language.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

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Writer's Role

Writer's Stop (Photo credit: Stephh922)

We live within our characters. When they bleed, we bleed. When they die, a part of us-that part that stirred them into existence in the first place-dies with them. Our emotions meld and erupt as our stories reach a climax. We are gods who share; partake in the sufferings of his creation. Who feel what they feel in order to associate with their ideas and views of their 'imaginary' universe.

A place in which they are as alive and real as we are in our own world. An existence so real that a stroke off our pen could mark a fatal mistake or an irreparable loss in someone's previously perfect life-a tangible mortal sin that wakes to hubris.

In the roles we write, we are alive and present. We matter. . . 

Larry Brooks.

The responsibility of a writer can not be played down.

Like bite marks on fossils identifying probable cause of extinction of a species, our scribbles outlast us. They become our voices and direct the imaginations of our readers, influence what they think they know about us.

 We all must push towards a point in our personal lives where we appraise our works through eyes of a reverence that's not arrogant. Pure and deserving of wo/men who create believable universes from the simple creed of creative thinking.

As chroniclers we define how the world we live in interprets the history of its people. The burden we've received can not be exaggerated.

When we pick up our pens to create a world through the power of the imagination, we ought to do it with the respect it deserves. The ideas we represent live forever. They will survive us long after our bone is dust to dust.

Laurence Dunbar, William Wordsworth, Sylvia Plath, Audrey Lorde and the army of writers who are no longer here with us did their share creating works of art for which readers and writers hold these in untamed reverence through the years.

We ought to live for something that will last. We ought to breathe our souls on the pages of our journals, weave our essences into the 'dots and slashes' and allow the waves of inspiration to muster the letters that form from the blots of our pen into phrases.

We are not to assume we will be up to this task when we are perfect.

We are writers. Writers write!

Like right this minute!

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

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