Rosetta Stone

In the golden days, we wondered.

Hands out

reaching

in the dark.

Our curiosity lead,

we flourished.

Bright and shining everything.

Our eyes,

fixed on glimmer,

faltered.

Lead astray.

Lied to.

In the end,

We knew.

But we were too confused

and too afraid

To move.

April 22nd 2015

Poetry is all that comes
When the pain is so deep
It squeezes the lungs
Choke-holding throats
Punctured and poked
Felt thoughts
Form sentences

Sour gas cowsualties
Smiles before bed
Sign off on your safety training
Before you're dead

Side-stepping spills for
toxic PR
Touch it if you're not afraid,
But of course you are

Budget shoes
Budget look
Who cares about the budget?
In the budget book

Squeezed and choked
Hunted and broke
Emancipation never did come
From boats

Essays could be written
Trails blazed down winding roads
There are plenty of words
To explore with

But instead please accept
These
sardonically simple
tear drops
For mother's day

Gaia forgive us.

Sincerely,

Clueless Wonder

Hiatus

Long time.
So long I've needed to oil the joints in my fingers to keep them from creaking as I write this.

Yes, I've been on a completely unintentional writing hiatus. This is my attempt to communicate with someone or something other than my own internal writer's brain. . .which seems to have shrunk considerably. There may need to be allowances made for my poor editing, boring prose or incomprehensible thoughts, but I'll try my best to make this an enjoyable experience for you, dear reader.

This writing hiatus has not been intentional and if I look at my blog, my last post was in July--which really wasn't that long ago. However, I have not been keeping up my practice. Since January, writing, which once bookended each day like two clear refreshing streams to dive into, became like trekking through mud-sucking river beds littered with the rusted corpses of half-devoured history. Usually I'd end up waist deep in mud, unable to take another step in any direction. After a while, discouraged by that hopeless feeling, I opted instead to sit on the river bank, staring out at the bleakness of my dreams turned to muck. Lately, I've been avoiding that place altogether, which is probably for the best.

I've found, over the past couple of weeks, that avoiding writing altogether has increased my urge to write. I've been getting ideas--good ideas--and I'm getting more and more excited about putting them into words, creating and working through stories and developing characters. I've been walking through different parts of my mind and forgetting about the past and the old stories and the old ways I was doing things.

I also started to think about my block in new ways. Sure, it started in Nigeria, after my hard drive crashed and my computer was out of commission. I was unable to access the drafts I had worked so hard on and my writing routine suffered. By the time I got back to Canada and got things with my computer sorted out, I was already  started down a new path of creation. I was growing a baby.

Now, I haven't read much about pregnancy's affects on artistry and I'm sure it's very different for every woman, but at this point, the baby is pretty much ready to pop out, and I can't help but wonder if that might have something to do with why I can suddenly write this blog post. It feels like the rains have come and the rivers are filling again, slowly, but surely. Perhaps the creative waters needed to be redirected for a while. . .
   
Another indication of this, I noticed, was an abnormally strong need to consume. I am an avid reader anyway, I have been for quite some time, but my reading patterns since I became pregnant have become somewhat unprecedented. I've read 28 books and notice that reading news articles and searching for information about random happenings in the world has been taking up most of my time. I've stayed away from TV (except for the Legend of Korra, book 3 and now 4!!! Which isn't even on TV anymore, so does that even count?!) and haven't watched too many movies or sought out a large number of new musicians, but books, books, books! It has felt unbalanced consuming so much with so little production, but perhaps I have been looking at the production end all wrong!

I am almost at the end of my pregnancy now (39 weeks!) and it feels like the streams that are slowly trickling back, covering up the muck to form new contours in the river bed promise to lead me to new places and old places to explore with new eyes. The eyes of a mother.

General Help Wanted

I am a barely contained scribble
That I could draw when I was 3
Deemed a masterpiece
Before I knew the word
And have since been weaned
To see lines
order
status
like Escher staircases
chronic aspirations
to compare dreams

And the colour
was discarded
And the meaning
misinterpreted
And the masterpiece
dated:
A scribble
By a 3 year old
Who didn't know any better

I am seeking a translator
A teacher
of my other tongue
Before my mother
Before the words usurped--
Ordained the shape
the texture,
the outline
Of this world
That is not mine

When a scribble was more honest
When the truth was heard in hums
When thoughts were in a language
I've forgotten

Termites for Dinner

Termites swarming at a gas station

Another interesting Nigerian food report from Abuja. A few weeks ago, these things were flying around. Smashing into lights and windows and finally, crawling in to my room!

Termite in my room!

 They aren't very big, but they have giant wings which gives the illusion of an enormous flying menace!

Termites swarming a construction warning light

Let's make a termite pie!

In fact, they are termites. They swarm at the beginning of the rainy season and their wings fall off soon after. People gather around bright lights to collect them in water and then fry them up and eat them!








 Eventually I worked up the nerve to actually try this delicacy, which Ogadinma assured me was very tasty. One got into our room and was flying around the light bulb. I filled our bathroom scooping bucket with water and tossed him in. I went outside and caught another that was lured by our balcony light.

Just as I was starting to think about frying them and putting them in my mouth and how the texture would be and what exactly they would taste like and whether or not this would be inhibited by the negative association I have between insects and food and whether or not I would like them and whether or not they would make me gag, there was a power outage and I couldn't attract any more. I looked down at the two outlines of wings and bodies paddling ripples in my purple bucket and felt kinda bad for them. I waited for the power to come back. I used my LED light to shine out into the night sky but all I saw were billions and billions of particles of dust. Rushing by and slowing down with my breath and changing directions and sparkling like stars. 

That was the last I saw of the termites. They haven't been around since. I guess I'll have to wait til next year. . .

Antiques

A live wire

A lit fuse

A spark in a crude world war

A bullet hole

Collective crimson consciousness

in perpetual motion

A rising tide

To wash away

All that has been named

Reclaiming relic mysteries

Of centuries

To come.

On an Airplane

I am on a flight to Cairo, examining the criss-crossing stamp of natural oil that someone else's hand left on the oval window beside me. I am returning from my Nana's funeral.

I flew back to Canada last week, unexpectedly when she passed away. It wasn't entirely unexpected. She was almost 90. Everyone says "she lived a good long life."

Out the window, the clouds are thick. A different kind of thick than the giant grey puff clouds that floated above Toronto when I landed last Thursday. They seemed more threatening somehow, but fluffier.

My window overlooks the engine. Here are the things I am trying hard not to think about:

1. Some bird flying much higher than is probably possible, merrily exploring the upper atmosphere when suddenly our jet engine slices him into an explosion of feathers, propelling us to our doom.

2. The missile that hit flight TWA 800 and the CIA and FBI cover up that ensued. Like might happen to our flight if some stray missile in some practice missile launch was miscalculated or mistakenly decided to propel us to our doom.

3. Climate change accentuated severe and novel weather conditions that might throw the plane out of the sky and propel us, slam-dunk style, to our doom.

4. The chances that the air traffic controller on duty has small children and was up late last night because one had a high fever, one got food poisoning and the other is obsessed with the new video games he got for his birthday last week causing the air traffic controller to fall asleep at their post, failing to catch the two planes on a direct crash course hurtling towards each other at 970 km/h, one being ours of course, that explode upon impact and propel us to our doom.

5. The odds that one would survive in such a situation.
No. that's a lie. I know those odds are close enough to 0 that I don't need to bother wasting my time not thinking about them.

6. My nana.

7. How sad it must be for my mom who just lost her own mother and who's kids are on opposite sides of the globe now more often then she ever could have possibly imagined when she held me in her arms for the first time.

8. How hard it must be to be a mom when the uncertainties in the world already threaten to devour you every minute and then you go and have children, that you would kill to protect, and you still have to accept that their safety is never a given.

I think my own kids would eat me alive.

I know that all I can ever do is give up
and hope for a while
but finally accept that even we are not permanent
and that everything must die.

Our life on earth is a gift
With all the joy and beauty and suffering and ugliness which would lose meaning and purpose if it continued forever.
So I breath in,
deeply.
out,
deeply.

Wipe my tears away and enjoy the clouds out the window. Their undefined edges and wispy tails. The ocean of whipped potatoes that won't catch us if we fall.

Radiohead - Reckoner

To celebrate the relocation of the "In Rainbows" CD I made when the full album was first released for free on the Radiohead website back in 2007:




I saw this music video, winner of a contest to design a radiohead video for the In Rainbows album, last year. Even seeing the video last year was very much delayed since it was posted by Radiohead in 2008 and probably won even before that. But, it's still a good video and probably can be understood by a more general audience at this particular juncture in time than it would have been back in 2008.

Enjoy.

Whistleblower: Rap News 19!

Finally! Whistleblower: Rap News 19!!!!!



Informer: Whistleblower as Snow:Snowden?

:)

There are no Capslam finals in Abuja

I wish I had been in Ottawa yesterday!!!



Congratulations to Bruce Narbaitz, Capital Slam Champion of 2013!

Whom I have never met.
Whose poetry I have never witnessed live.
But if I had been judging that performance, I think the 10 would write itself!

Poems from all the beautiful and amazing poets that made it to the finals here!

Clear

I feel that recently the voices I've given my attention to have brought a lot of clarity to issues that are very muddy. To me at least.

I am rarely convinced of anything unless I am convinced of the core and sometimes it takes a lot of time, observation and experience to understand what that core actually consists of.

And even then, what is best to do with the understanding of such a core?

I still feel like I'm travelling through a cloud at the moment but I'm trying to enjoy the scenery this time.

When clarity comes, as I'm certain it will, I think it will be crystal.

Sole Debater

This life, so far, has been about discovery.

Everything has been a very big question mark. I mean, big questions. Like why are we here? What does it all mean? Why this set of circumstances and not a different set? Why me? Why now?

Everything around me changes.

Sometimes there are cages full of chickens strapped to the tops of cars.

Sometimes there are thick grey clouds that bury landscapes in snow over night.

Sometimes there are frijoles fried on hot slabs of metal and folded into wheat tortillas on street corners.

Sometimes there are conbinis open 24/7 staffed by sleeping high school students who aren't allowed to have jobs.

Sometimes there are bicycle rickshaw drivers resting on the seats of their rickshaws.

Sometimes there are cities so congested it takes hours to walk a few blocks.

Sometimes there are faces that blend into one another and become unrecognizable from strangers'.

Sometimes there are trees and bushes so thick there is no path.

Sometimes there are smiles carved so deeply in my memory, I am sure I will remember them in lives to come.

Sometimes there are sand hills and cacti.

Sometimes there are rocks reaching up to the sky.

Sometimes there are clouds reflected in an expansive glass that shatters with rain and rolls with wind.

Sometimes there are stars.

Sometimes there are beams of colour that dance ballet across the sky.

Sometimes there are families, biological or otherwise.

Sometimes there is loneliness.

Sometimes I wonder if travelling through space also means travelling through time. I wonder if any different place on earth really is a different place or if it's all just the same place at a different time. That doesn't mean forward or backwards time, just different.

I wonder if every story is the same story just from a different perspective.

And all the people are me, but with a different set of circumstances.

I don't care about money or cars or clothes or popular kids or being cool. Maybe that means I will never have or be any of those things. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it means I will be a hypocrite one day. Maybe it means I already am one. I don't really care. It's important to know both sides, I think. . .somewhere deep inside of me. You can't really say anything about any side if you don't know both. And you can't know anything. So really, you can't say anything either.

I think this life has been about discovery. I'm not sure why. Maybe I'm a reincarnation of a very old soul. I sometimes feel that I am. Why the heck would I be so concerned about how I'm living otherwise? Why the heck do I feel so old all the time? Why am I so bored and unimpressed by all of the shiny things the world keeps trying to throw at me? There's no explanation that I can come up with. I've always been bored of it. It's not my parents and it's not my friends and it's not that I'm a rebellious insolent punk rocker on purpose. That's just how I feel. And I don't even like punk. . .
. . .anymore.

I'm much more interested in the unmatched originality that exists in the bark of each tree. The contours of the earth from the top of a mountain. How the sky ever got so blue and how gigantic and tiny the world is at the same time. I genuinely don't understand why other people don't appreciate each moment and the fact that they are breathing air and thinking thoughts and hearing sounds and tasting the inside of their mouths (or maybe gum or maybe the lingering smoke of a cigarette or cup of coffee, or maybe the saliva of their lover's mouth) faster than they can comprehend and that this. Moment. Will. Never. Come. Back. Ever.

It's gone. And it keeps going. So quickly you can't catch it.

AND YET, we live. We make plans. We do things. We fall in love. We die. And so do bajillions of other people, plants, animals, civilizations, planets, universes, etc.

How are we not in a constant state of wonder?

How can anything else be more important?

How can we think we have even an ounce of control?

How can we not bow down in amazement. . .at life?

If I feel that my hard work will pay off, I'm not totally sure what kind of pay off I'm expecting.

The hard work that I've been doing has not felt that hard and has not been any kind of work that most people on this earth would acknowledge or respect.

I have not contributed that much to society, at least not yet, or not in a measurable way. I have not held a long term 'job'.

My work is much more about examining myself and trying to be a better person. It has been about learning more about the world and the people in it. It has been about learning how to be compassionate and love people better. It has been about serving the world. It has been about trying not to be selfish.

I'm not sure what the pay off for this is. I'm not sure I believe in an afterlife or heaven even though earlier I talked about reincarnation. I do think that reincarnation might be real but I'm not striving for good karma. I'm not trying to have a better next life. . .at least not intentionally.

I'm striving to have a better this life. I'm striving to learn more about myself so that I can determine where I would be most happy, what I think, who I am, why and how to best live in this world based on that. How I can best change the world to help others be more happy too. But maybe that just means I am a trouble maker.

Today I was thinking about something that I think I want to do. . .and that is to make things more levelled. To try to show the beauty in even the most ugly of things. To try to show the hope in even the most despondent situations. To try to show that seed in which the next moment will grow.

I think that needs to be an important part to my expression and my art. To try to show something horrible or a character at their worst point and how that worst point leads to the birth of something new. I think that will be a theme over the course of the next few decades, probably. At least hopefully. . .or I feel that we're all in for big trouble. So probably good to start with that.

A New Friend

 Look who stumbled onto my balcony. . .


He also pooped on my balcony (-__-;)

Me: "Can we keep him? Can we? Can we?"

Ogadi: "Throw that cat away!"

Q.U.E.E.N.

Told you.

Abuja pace

9ja.
What has been going on lately?

Entrance to Millenium Park

Well, I've started to get my life into some kind of rhythm. Of course, it's not perfectly complete yet. But the essential bits are there. The congregation of birds that sing sun salutations from the trees outside my window, the rising but muffled call to prayer, the jangling beats shoe repairers drum out on their tool boxes to attract those in need of their services, the tapped horns of wandering taxis signalling vacancy, the drip of the leaky air conditioner in the office, the droning buzzzzzzzzz of the generators whenever the power's out, the more aggressive brrrrrrrrr of the community vegetable grinder who has his business just outside of my flat, the hiss of the gas pressure when I open the tank to light the stove, the click of the lighter, the whoosh of the flame. . .the thick silence of the nights.

I remember noticing, specifically, the sound of highway traffic from my bedroom window in Canada before I left. I was lying in bed around 3am (my usual bedtime when I'm at home) and I could hear transport trucks and cars speeding across the asphalt in that low familiar hum. The highway is more than a kilometre from my house but it made no difference.
I remember wondering if it had always been like that. If the highway sounded so busy at that time even 5 years ago? Was everyone always in this much of a rush to get somewhere else? The hum stayed with me until I woke (around 11am) and even grew to include the attitudinal wheeze of aircrafts forever landing or taking off.

Aso Rock at Sundown

Here, I love watching people sitting on benches behind corner vegetable stands. Security guards watching football all day sitting back, teasing each other, doubling over with the kind of uncontrollable laughter that makes it sound like something is caught in your throat. Girls and boys and men and women walking with perfect posture and balancing a day's earnings worth of peanuts or 'pure water' on their heads while they dodge in and out of crowds and stopped traffic. It really makes you reconsider the limits of willpower. I've seen someone accidentally brush shoulders with a girl carrying a giant tub of something and the girl was able to turn her head back and scold him without even the hint of a wobble.

It doesn't mean it's easy, or better or even more desirable necessarily. . .but it is a nice and eye-opening change.

Anybody?

Nagarkot, Nepal

Searching high and low

for anything

any kind of anywhere

to step

any sort of anyway

to proceed

any type of anyhow

to live

any part of anyone

to believe

and every heart

speaks

only

.^.   .

     V

 

Square vs. Circle

How long will we walk through wildness
Paved over before our time?
How long will we try to find
Connections through concrete?
How long lost?
How long found?
How long now?

Staring out barred windows
To wall lined streets
Sneaking green
Disobedient empire

We've caged ourselves for security
From the wildness that grows
Despite heavy machinary
Despite all of the code
Despite all of the ways
conceived to kill it

Rather than praise tenacity
We'd make God
A comfortable life

Aljazeera interview with Binyavanga Wainaina

Interview with Binyavanga Wainaina, one of my favourite writers.

Field Trip To Ilorin

Last week I went on a field trip to Kwara State to visit my colleague. She is a the volunteer management and training adviser for the NGVP Program through the Kwara Ministry of Education whereas I work in the same position but remotely for the NGVP program running through KSSSSMB in Kano.

She was hosting a training for NGVP volunteers on project management and I was invited to observe, contribute and meet the volunteers involved in the project. The volunteers in Kwara were working on proposals for small grants and needed some guidance on proposal writing.

The Ministry of Education

NGVP volunteers are sent to schools to support teachers, build capacity and ultimately help to improve the quality of education in the schools they work. They can also apply for small grant funding from VSO for support. One group of volunteers applied for funding to purchase computers for the schools they work in. Another for setting up a library. Another to host a soap making workshop, a skill that could help generate income for the workshop participants. Most of the projects were well thought out as far as sustainability and logistics were concerned but lacked explanation and left too many questions unanswered for the funders. That means VSO.

Bat Migration

mmm Mango season

Ilorin, the capital city of Kwara state, was where I was staying with volunteers that had been placed with ESSPIN. They're provided with a pretty sweet house! Air conditioning, a huge generator, washing and drying machines, flat screen TVs and even hot showers!!! What luxurious treatment I was given in Ilorin!! I was most excited watching the huge migration of bats from the balcony as they confetti-ed the sky in their nightly migration for food, the massive thunderstorm that I watched from the same balcony, inching further inside at about the same speed the storm progressed, a full moon-lit bike ride to Kwara Hotel and joking with the guards about protecting my friend's bicycle, the mango tree branches bending with the weight of countless green mangoes swelling to ripeness. . .

The trip home was also amazingly beautiful, for me. Forest covered hills, mist rising from valleys (though there weren't really mountains, just hills) all against that rust-red dirt.

When the bus stopped at the half way point for food, I met a guy who had recognized me from the Ilorin Shop-Rite. --In fact, I was lost in the Shop-Rite. Not lost like I didn't know where I was going, lost more like that song by The Clash. I feel lost in big box stores anywhere. They make me uneasy. . .it makes me even more uneasy to see the number of people that flock to them everywhere. But I also wonder if the rise of big box stores in the global south will mean the rise of small farmers markets in the global north. . .?--

Wuse Market in Abuja

Mr. Shop-Rite was going to Abuja too. I expressed my preference for Ilorin. He, who had grown up there, preferred Abuja.

That is the way, isn't it. People from cities preferring rural areas. People from rural areas preferring cities. . .there always seems to be a longing for that which is unknown. . .it's a rare occurrence to find someone that is completely content with exactly what they have.

It was really interesting to travel to Kwara and get some first hand experience of the NGVP program.

Ogadi's Egusi Soup! Yummy

The trainings in Nasarawa and Kwara and then reading past notes from the volunteer that established this project has helped me get a better grasp on what exactly my job entails. So has asking a bajillion questions to my project manager in the VSO office (who has been very patient, repeating the same things over and over). So I'm starting to understand. . .but being so far away from my project and volunteers in Kano makes it difficult to know the specific challenges that volunteers and partners are faced with there and how best I can support them.

But for now, in my little apartment in Abuja, with my little Aloe Vera plant, unfolding volunteer placement and the wonderful, Ogadi. . .I have nothing to complain about :)
(except the power cuts and the rat that infiltrated the kitchen while I was away. . .!)

Apart

The melancholy absence of a toothbrush
Solemn empty hangers
Lack of footsteps padding down the hall
A breeze that no longer carries wisps of your scent. . .
This is the power of nothing.