Noble Cause

HAPPY 55TH INDEPENDENCE DAY ANNIVERSARY NIGERIA!

Updated: October. 8th.2015

I’m gonna fill the follicles of forever flaunting this fine moment,

Paste your name to eternity like the stars on the firmament.

I’m gon’ wring out the grime while I grind on your ingenuity,

Strive for the stupendous and stack syllables to share your story.

You are one hell of a survivor I want to take you up on the exhale.

You are spectacular it is such fun to be sprung on a stunning you.

I have found home lives in you so I pledge to sustain your fame.

There aint nothing makes me prouder n’ to bleed my pen for you.

I want to hymn the appeal of your seeds; the lost and the bombed,

This moment bonded us in ways far beyond what we could picture,

That’s why I stand up for your tomorrow; it’s death before dishonor,

I need no other argument I have found my one solitary noble cause.

Akpan

Superhero

Dad passed away on first of July, 1995
He is my very own superhero. This poem is to his memory.

You stirred a flare for reading in me.

I recall crawling into the confines of your private library

Hounded by classics assuming names tricky to remember

Sometimes I call up images of your cloth-bound hardcovers;

‘On Aggression;’ ‘Try Anything Once;’ and ‘The Governor.’

On every first page a date underlined your peculiar signature.

I still picture you waving ‘English Without Tears’ in my view.

It’s hard to visualize I rode your backtrail without meaning to

Most amazing of all is how you honed my obsession for books

Makes me proud I was raised on books by an uneducated you.

I wish I could paint your face on cosmic canvas

Convey to the world your unique colors.

I wish I could spray your qualities over the horizon

In smoke Dad, may I do the sweet honors?

I got this feeling where my heart resides

That when we meet again away from this body

I’d have earned the privilege to look into your eyes

And say simply but firmly, “I am my father’s kid.”

Meanwhile, I hope it would delight you to know

That I have etched your face on everlasting stone.

Akpan

Season of Sacrifice

And I know where my happiness lies;

My salvation unfolds before my eyes.

I anticipate feverishly, the morning of evil's demise

Thus my pen shall never run dry until it is realized,

Until I obtain true justification for this sacrifice.

Devastated and cornered though they may be,

Our outcome is tied to their outcome by destiny’s strings.

Our survival is as slim as the vapor of their dying breath.

If we forget them, who we are perishes in their death.

Cause the tragedy is not to die but to be wasted.

Daily, the fate of thousands arrive upon a nightmare,

Spun out like the thread of a graphic horror story.

Day and night their pastime is a game called terror and fear.

Our organs rot and decay and all we do is drag our feet;

They live on the edge of death, blinded by tears.

“The summer has passed

The harvest has ended

But we are not saved.”

Akpan

The Best Ideas Are Weird Ideas

I have run into ideas for articles just by riding a bus—‘Amassing Graffiti,’ ‘The Sideview Apocalypse,’ ‘Anarchy on Wheels,’ these three were all dredged up by my experiences on the Lagos highways. And then I've had ideas dropped into my mind while reading a book (not necessarily fiction); ‘Necronomicon vs. Shepherd’s Journal,’ ‘The Map to Atlantis,’ ‘Stephen King’s Inspiration for UTD’ and quite a few were triggered by my childhood throwbacks; ‘My Childhood,’ ‘What Sir Taught Me.’ But there's more and I wouldn't want to beat my head up because of those. The few listed here should give you a sizeable idea of what I'm trying at.

Many authors talk about how some of their famous work was inspired by an ‘odd thing’—events which under different circumstances they'd automatically pass up. (Unless of course, they apply their 6th sense, which through constant practice they've trained to be on red alert.) For Robert Louis Stevenson, (who I'd call RLS from here onward), a telephone conversation on the edge of civilization was all it took to provoke a scene in a novel called 'The Wrecker.' The communication device was still a fairly new invention at the time RLS visited an hotel in Napa Valley. He'd lived in a city and all that time in 1880s he'd never been privileged to use the device until that fateful day.

Well, guess what he did after that? Like any great writer would RLS wrote up a novel and included a scene where a character, Mr. Pinkerton says, ‘May I use your telephone?’ A line that's considered one of the earliest references to the telephone in a novel!

“It did occur to me that I've never really read a story that revolved around bathroom functions,” Stephen King on his inspiration for his 800 page tome which he called, ‘Dreamcatcher.’ King was inspired to write the book because as he said, so much of the really terrible news we get in our lives, we get in the bathroom. Don't you consider it silly or wouldn't have waved off the idea as silly if it ever crossed your mind to craft a story based on ‘bathroom functions?’

Now, we ain't concerned about major events, things even a novice would wish could be turned into a book or film. That kind of stuff you'd get everywhere just watch the news. What I'm about on this page is churning out a bestseller or just a great story from a snatch of image in your mind, something whispered in a dark place, 'an overturned bicycle in a quiet neighborhood, a line glimpsed off a cut-out newspaper sailing on the neck of the wind.

Ideas have a sense of humor and sometimes, they love jumping out on you from the most unlikely of places where you least expect to come across them. Like it's said, ‘Ideas are literally everywhere.’ But if you don't train your subconscious and keep it on the lookout you'd keep missing out on the best things life has got to offer.

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan

Related articles

• Front Page News: The Necronomicon as Imagined By Other Authors
• Writing Every Day: Stephen King
• R.L. Stine to Re-Boot 'Fear Street' YA Series
• Stephen King Goes to the Movies: The Author's Best (& Worst) Cameos
• What All Agents Want in a Great Young Adult Novel - June 13 Webinar With Critique by Agent Carlie Webber
• 72 of the Best Quotes About Writing

Writing as the Finest Form of Telepathy

“I’m riding in the backseat of a VW Vanagon and situated at the extreme left. Some lucky dude is squeezed into the scrawny space between me and another guy who is roughly my size. I use the phrase “squeezed” because there’s barely any wiggle room spared between seats. This takes it out on the knees thrust into the metal which shores up the backrest of the seats.

This fella is one tall son of a gun who just got his butt stuck in a tight spot (pardon the pun). Tucked away underneath this same seat is a medium-sized speaker and blaring loud music. The sound is all out of joint and effectively multiplies the drama...”

I just sent a picture directly from my mind to yours. And for the space of two to three minutes I made you hear my thoughts and see my dreams. I bet you saw the tall guy and tried to imagine him squirm in discomfort between the seats, trying and failing to find succor for his aching knees. You probably, winced as the jagged sounds poured through the blown-out speakers into your ears. On that one score, I have achieved my goal as a writer.

 

The level of telepathy transmitted through the craft of writing beats what is obtainable in any other form of art by a wide margin. In writing, all you have and grapple with are several letters lumped up together to fill a blank surface. No wonder a great writer once said, “Writing is an act of faith.” How true that saying becomes when we weigh the options under the light of thought transference—when we consider how much responsibility is thrust upon the reader’s shoulders, in other words. There’s an English proverb that goes like this, “Quick believers need broad shoulders” same applies to passionate readers.

Readers are trusted or entrusted to read the writer’s mind correctly and give appropriate interpretations without any interference from the writer. It’s the writer saying to the reader in other words, “I absolutely have faith in your discretion.” “Over to you, I trust your judgment.” And you know the amazing about this gig? It works 99.9% of the time as writer-reader minds intervolve and spit out a more refined universe.

“We were walking along the boardwalk in Ocean Park one summer evening, arm in arm, my friend Sid and me, when he saw a familiar sight on one of the benches just ahead, not far from the surf.”

Tell me you didn’t hear the sound of the waves crashing in on the beach or see the foam bubbling up in the wake of the breakers. It’s okay, go ahead and lie you didn’t feel the chill of the wind coming in off the ocean to the shore. And how about the vivid image of the narrator as he strolls leisurely, his pal by side as both men take in the scenery? With those few lines of words you’ve just been given a peek into the mind of a genius. The clip you just read is from a Ray Bradbury short story, “Tête-À-Tête.” A fine story that’s short on narrative prose but long on engaging dialogue. Any fan of the great writer will agree it’s what he’s known for and praised for.

But writing is in itself magic and the wonderful thing about it is that we need not do a thing to acquire the powers. We are born to operate naturally on this level of telepathy and nothing in this world can compare with it.

Keep your pens bleeding.

Akpan

Amassing Graffiti

An old model Toyota Liteace gives the heads up through a yellow painted “Back to School” label. A VW Vanette rejoins with an offbeat “Mummy’s Pet.” Yet, a beat up Nissan Urvan serves up a terse comeback with an in-your-face “Back to Sender” sticker. There are a string of buses with the “God” graffiti on them, mostly stuff like “God First,” “God is Great,” “God Pass Them,” “No King as God,” “God’s Time is the Best,” “No Be God?” “God is Good,” “Man No Be God” (pidgin version of “Man ain’t God”) “God Dey” (pidgin version of “There’s a God”),  I watch, a trifle amused as a kept up VW Caravelle marked with the label “H₂O” negotiates a turn, early on I spotted an old model Toyota HiAce tagged “Big Fish.” I visualize these drivers hanging out on the same team—some inane variety of a mobile EPA where the story ends with the tuned up “H₂O” gobbling up the tacky “Big Fish.” But life doesn’t work that way and folks gotta maintain up in the game if family’s going to have food on the table. Probably, why the owner emblazoned the rear window of this bus I’m riding (which is a copy of “Big Fish”) with two words; a no fuss phrase which carries in it all the authority Lagos drivers need to “Carry Go” as one useful pointer hacked in chicken scratches says, it is uncomplicated yet delivers its import like a decree when it states “No Story.”

 “Have a problem with my driving? Call 08099999999,” reads the inscription on the company truck speeding past my morning ride. Such CTAs (call to action) are commonplace, these days. You will find a hundred variations of it painted on transports especially, on the back of school buses. A friend once boarded public transport which showed off similar message on its body. He committed the number to memory before climbing on the bus and decided to humor the driver (or whoever had drafted up the phrase) so he called him up. And guess who picked up? It wasn’t the driver but it was just as well. Someone who was probably home or about her business several miles from the scene of incident answered the phone. And said, “Hello. My husband is over speeding again, isn’t he?”

 

Large red letters of “Remember six feet” marks the bus leading this one. The rear window of another (a yellow old model Volkswagen Transporter) preaches “One Love” in daring, bold letters. Several other buses wheeze past flaunting some ambiguous graffito, many in local dialect and I’d rather not go there. I wouldn’t want to spend the whole day acting interpreter unnecessarily extending the length of this post.  You see, Lagos drivers are a little religious on an entire level. A Volkswagen Vanette riding along beside my bus boasts, “I Love this God!” As we drew near the other auto I am offered a close up of the guy behind the wheel. I struggle to imagine this fellow as a bible holder and can’t turn off the image of a thug lord in a suit, wielding a bible like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat.

The sticker of the American eagle dappled with the red and blue stars and stripes has by unanimous consent, become the secret transit code of Nigeria’s highways. You hardly fetch a commercial bus not wearing the gummed label like some Restricted Area access sticker.  Besides, there are other writings I can’t quite place in a category like the ones above. “Holly Mary” (could be same as Holy Mary, who knows?); “Psalm 140 v. 1” (Get your bibles, folks); “Empty” (Now why would anybody scrawl this on public transport?); “Superstar” (I feel this guy); “Backward Never” (Amen to that, bro); “It pains you, why?” (I got this one off the cowl of a Volkswagen Beetle). And so on and so forth like that. Long before I started collecting bus graffiti, I ran into a certain brilliant one-liner. It was drawn on the rear of one of those huge Marcopolo passenger vehicles. It seemed to have found me just when I could use a breathing spell and here’s what it said, “No Competition in Destiny.” It never slips my mind how that one-liner rearranged my entire mindset.

Talking about graffiti calls up an early childhood memory about a story I overheard my father talk over with a relative who bunked with us. He told a tale of a battered public transport which, threw bystanders into a fit of hee-haws when it passed by. In time, the driver designed a method to the madness. It was in a sense, his way of saying you can laugh all you want but wait until you see what I got written up on the rear window. See who’s laughing then. On the rear window makeshift glass, a spread of polyethylene held fast with adhesive tape, he had scratched two words in Ibibio, my native dialect. These words: “Asak Uka” which by interpretation means, “Yo Laughing at Yo Mama!”

Keep your pens bleeding!

Akpan

Related articles

• Social Media Graffiti
• SF takes aim at graffiti vandals, tries to lessen burden on victims
• Graffiti on school bus garage targets driver
• Creative or curse? Graffiti artists find wide-open canvases across Michigan cities
• Graffiti taggers could face a much bigger price tag
• San Antonio confronts graffiti problem with cell phone reports

Fact Imitating Fiction

There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe 

When the writer, Chinua Achebe wrote his novel, A Man of the People he didn’t exactly know he was wading deep waters at least, not until he found himself in a compromising situation.

            In his latest book, There Was a Country, A Personal History of Biafra which is a memoir of sorts, the late author spins a soul-searching tale of rut within the political class, the lust for power and the tragedy of a people’s indifference to a gradual national autolysis.

Beneath an undertone of grave urgency the voice of a savvy writer goes through the roof on a well-oiled, jet-propelled craft that hypes up the intuitive muse within. It doesn’t just arouse but nurtures his muse into an orderly and consistent relation with his own practical consciousness in a setup where it becomes difficult to indulge the one and skip the other.

Death toll peaked at a couple hundreds per day and most Igbos in Lagos hightailed it when violence against the ethnos came to a head. Achebe (an Igbo man, himse) couldn’t bring himself to accept the detail played out in his eyes; his job, his life as he knew it was done and over with. One day, while snooping around on his office grounds, he bumped into his boss.

“Badejo (Victor Badejo then director general of Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation) confirmed a story I had heard of drunken soldiers who came to my office ‘wanting to find out which was more powerful their guns or my pen.’”

Chinua Achebe,

There Was a Country

If you can remember our previous talk of a book within this bigger book; a novel with the name, A Man of the People, I assume you wouldn’t find it difficult to wrap your fingers around the author’s peculiar dilemma.

“Some may wonder why soldiers would be after me so fervently… it happened that I had just written ‘A Man of the People’ which forecast a military coup that overthrows a corrupt civilian government. Clearly a case of fact imitating fiction and nothing else, but some military leaders believed that I must have had something to do with the coup and wanted to bring me in for questioning.”

Chinua Achebe,

There Was a Country

Achebe had sent a copy of ‘A Man of the People’ to a writer friend of his to read and review before the official publication date came around. Said friend was the famous Nigerian writer, poet and anthologist J.P. Clark. Inside the building where their little writing community rendezvoused, a community with a roll-call which boasted great names like Wole Soyinka, Onuora Nzekwu amongst others, Clark would arrived much later than Achebe uttered words (about the book and its author’s insight) that Achebe didn’t quite get over until his passing on several years later.

“It happened that my new novel, ‘A Man of the People,’ was about to be published in London, and I was communicating with my publisher, Heinemann. I knew the book was going to be problematic for me because of its criticism of Nigerian politics—very severe criticism. The novel after all, climaxes in a military coup.
                “I had sent one copy of the novel to J.P. Clark on a Wednesday, two days. When J.P. arrived at the meeting his voice rang out from several hundred feet away.                ‘Chinua, you know, you are a prophet. Everything in this book has happened except a coup!’

Chinua Achebe,

There Was a Country

Unbeknownst to both writers, they were sitting on the lip of a horrendous drop into the pit of the first military coup in Nigeria—the cold calculation and diabolic art of tactless men which has tainted the course of the nation’s upward mobility almost for all time. The evening of the same day this discussion took place recorded the successful execution of a military coup.

“When the artist’s imagination clashes with life’s very reality it creates a heavy conundrum.”—Achebe.

The job of a writer, contrary to traditional belief is one of the most dangerous though all he (or she) crafts are fictional works.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Related articles

• Ghana President Mahama delivers Achebe Lecture in US
• Achebe, A Man Ahead Of His Generation, By Prof Bart Nnaji
• Day 20 of 28 - Black History Month - Chinua Achebe
• Professor Chinua Achebe was not a Christian!
• There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe - review
• There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe

The Sideview Apocalypse

Caution, which is an essential you'll stow away in a trunk as a functional make-up of the maintenance kit turns up missing in a Lagos driver's vocabulary. These roadhogs hit their mind's delete key on a whim at a hint of the C-Word—and don’t you dare pretend the situation’s less complicated where you live. They've laid down their cautionary hats. These days they prefer not to.

There was an age when blinkers were a vehicle's most delicate hardware. The world moved on and subsequently, readjusted the standpoint on blinkers. In more recent time, motorists traded interest in the turn signal for vehicle part of a little more elevated status—and that’s not on the terms of importance but of position—the sideview mirror. When a Lagos driver isn’t all over trying to trump James Bond’s driving skills; which happens when he (or she) is constrained to proceed at a crawl, motorists turn their energies to ripping off the other guy's sideview. 007 stunts are small potatoes compared to this delirious real-life-car-chase-choreography from hell.

I should clear up the air a bit so I don’t hand you the wrong end of the stick. The episode conveyed through this prose is stringently localized (that don’t extricate the speed daemons in your locale). If you've been around Lagos, Nigeria or better yet, if you read my post on “James Bond driving,” you have a roughly sizeable idea how this yarn’s going to come out.

Courtesy: pbase.com

Let’s do a little comparison. A covert intense virtual feud is all the rage on the internet right now. A development not alien to the action flick scenario played out on a minute by minute basis on Lagos highways and byways rules the digital multiverse. Millions of site owners strive for awareness or traffic—pardon the pun—it gives a sense of congestion on the internet. But as it is with real traffic so it is with the virtual; there is a destination in the big picture.

            Saying’s still true ‘if you keep your focus soon your focus will keep you.’ You don't have to take the lead. You aren’t stuck in some sick race where the laurel wreath gifts the suicidally speedy. What you can do, and should, is seek out new and fresh channels to pull in your resources as some Lagos commercial bus drivers sometimes do even though at the expense of commuters.

One minute you're staring out your rearview watching some bum stuffed behind the wheels of a beat-up truck pull up to your bumper. What happens next is a blur as the monster hunk of metal hurtles into the scrawny space between your automobile and the highway divider. It gives your ride the bum's rush, collecting paint scrapings for souvenir and not quite leaving your sideview out of the wager. Splinters of glass spray on the tar and all that’s left is a hollow, battered (mostly plastic) housing.

            In time, drivers learned at a pretty price, the implicit meaning of the warning legend engraved on the wing mirror; the one which reads “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.”

Akpan

Related articles

• Are Car Safety Features Too Distracting For Drivers?
• Your Bad Driving Habits Get on My Nerves
• Joseph Rose: Turn signal slackers, tailgating bullies dominate 2014 Peevie Awards
• Accreditation: Lagos commercial drivers, conductors, in mad rush for registration
• Rearview cameras could soon be standard in all vehicles
• EB I-84 reopens between Troutdale, Cascade Locks

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

Related articles

• Ibibio the Land of Honour.
• Good Ideas for New Year Resolutions to Expand Your Cultural Horizons
• Tracking Dialects Across the USA
• Naija and our accent forming!
• The things people refuse...
• What "It's all relative" really means.