A Man Like Mandela

Nelson Mandela
Courtesy: gettyimages.com

Mandela,

Like Mandela,

A man like Mandela,

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

I wanna be the face of courage,

I wanna be the essence of positive rage,

I wanna be the radar that keeps focus in range.

I wanna be the prime axis of change;

I wanna be the reason to turn the page,

I wanna be the item that gets your wits engaged.

I wanna be the spotlight of my own Madiba;

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

I wanna be the symbol of what makes a man.

I wanna make solitary confinement something grand;

I wanna be the bond of unity in a divided land,

I wanna take fear and bend it into triumph.

I wanna seize emancipation with no strings attached;

I wanna make my name a synonym for survivor.

I wanna be the shape of hope and its father;

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

Mandela,

Like Mandela,

A man like Mandela,

I wanna be a man like Mandela.

Akpan

From a Cell 8

The 8-foot cell that was Mandela's home on Robben Island.

One man

(And he was no ordinary man)

Had a vision and moved the motion to take a stand

The self-named lords tagged him bad gone mad

And shipped the hell-raiser off to rot on an isolated island.

But his was a story that couldn’t be caged behind metal bars.

One man

(I said he wasn't no ordinary man)

Opened his mouth to speak and his voice rose beyond his cell bars

And the nuance of his message held steady thro out every land;

A song of infinite hope that screamed the line, if you believe you can.

The man died but the memories of him live in the legacy of his plan.

One man

(You know, he was no ordinary man)

Learned that courage ain't in the strength of your arms

But triumph over the stuff that cripples your very heart.

The life he led drove the highpoints home like nail piercing plank,

His words reassure us like stars guiding travelers in the dark.

Akpan

Amandla!

Mandela Forever!

                                    They said it was impossible

                                    But the word don't mean zilch

                                    To eyes that visualize the invisible.

                                    Because to you impossible was less than nothing.

                       

                                    It always seems impossible

                                    Until faith trundles in with the outcome,

                                    Can’t no Robben stall the inevitable,

                                    You proved it when you broke free with a song.

                                   

                                    That’s why we call you Mandela!

                                    You are the one true Madiba,

                                    The vindicated Giant of Africa.

                                    Madiba! Mandela! Amandla!

                                   

                                    Akpan

                                   

                                    

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Mandela: Couldn't Heaven Wait?

Merry Christmas, Madiba!

One more Christmas and it may have been right.

Then they could have you and paste you like the stars to the sky.

I know there’s always a first time

So why didn’t heaven single out this moment;

Pick a perdurable person to perform a positive pilot project?

It would have felt right

And we wouldn’t whine

Yeah, it may not have hurt as much to cry.

For once, couldn’t heaven wait?

And couldn’t Christmas floor the pedal and get here ASAP?

How do we trade healing for this hurting?

Silence been pregnant since the exit of Mandela.

They couldn’t slam the door on December, that’s alright.

But couldn’t heaven for once, just hold the damn line?

Akpan

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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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I Am

I am the prince of Egypt

And this is the slaying of the Egyptian.

I am Mahatma Ghandi

And this is the revolution of the Indians.

I am Oliver Twist

I dare ask for more.

I am Mount Everest

Standing tall with the clouds in my hair.

I am Sizwe Bansi

This is King Williams Towm.

I am Steven Barnes

And this The Great Sky Woman;

I am John Bunyan

Visualize this Pilgrim’ Progress.

I am Ludwig Van Beethoven

And this here’s my 5th Symphony.

I am Will Smith

I am Legend.

I am Nostradamus

And this is tomorrow.

I am MLK

With big dreams to never stop being free.

I am Homer

And this is the Iliad;

I am Nelson Mandela

This is the unconditionally free South Africa!

I am MJ

I am off the wall.

I am Jane Taylor

Twinkle, twinkle I’m a star!

I am John Milton

No sweat. This is Paradise Regained.

I am Christopher Columbus

This is the New World.

I am Maya Angelo

And Still I Rise

I am a firefly

And this is the darkest of night.

I am Miriam Makeba

And this is Aluta Continua.

I am 2pac,

I was born not to make it but I did!

I am William Wordsworth

And this child is father of the man.

I am Gulliver

And this is Lilliput.

I am Charles Dickens

And this is the story of Copperfield.

I am Achebe;

I thrive as Things Fall Apart.

I am Luther Vandross

Stealing one final dance with my father.

I am the Trojan horse

Within is an arsenal to capture a fortified city.

I am Abe Lincoln

And this is the Proclamation of Emancipation.

I am Mungo Park

This is the stretch of the Niger.

I am the Magi

And this is the cradle in a manger.

I am Hamlet:

To be or not to be?

I am the Shepherd boy;

Give me five smooth rocks and I’ll slay a giant.

I am Arthur

And this is Excalibur.

I am Wole Soyinka

I am the pride of the Jewel.

I am Tananarive Due

And this is My Soul to Keep.

I am Negro;

The whole world is African soil.

I am Napoleon Bonaparte

I came, I saw, I conquered.

I am Tupac Amaru Shakur;

Sheez, it’s just Me Against the World.

I am Terry McMillan

This is how I got my groove back.

I am Stephen King:

And this is The Stand.

Akpan