In Memorium: Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

I posted just the poem below on Lost Menagerie--only the second 'guest poem' there (more would be welcome). Chinua Achebe is incomparable in ways, yet his modest demeanor would always have us point to the work of Sole Woyinka, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, Vaclav Havel, Nawal Al Saadawi, Arundhati Roy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose recent novel Purple Hibiscus starts off with "Things began to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère." Chinua Achebe is the grandfather of post-colonial literature, especially since his 1959 epic Things Fall Apart was published on the threshold of colonial and politically chaotic consciousness. He was boundless in sensitivity for all humans who would have, for example, reached for the hem of Jesus' garment. He taught us, like Yeats, that a 'widening gyre' and 'anarchy unloosed' could happen anywhere--even in the furthest west and north of Europe. He lamented the scourge of Sharia law and its impact immanently and hypothetically. Nonetheless, his body returned (no doubt his request) to the quagmire that is modern Nigeria. May he rest in peace, and I'm positive he'd bid us, the living, the same.

Vultures

In the greyness
and drizzle of one despondent
dawn unstirred by harbingers
of sunbreak a vulture
perching high on broken
bones of a dead tree
nestled close to his
mate his smooth
bashed-in head, a pebble
on a stem rooted in
a dump of gross
feathers, inclined affectionately
to hers. Yesterday they picked
the eyes of a swollen
corpse in a water-logged
trench and ate the
things in its bowel. Full
gorged they chose their roost
keeping the hollowed remnant
in easy range of cold
telescopic eyes...

Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep - her face
turned to the wall!

...Thus the Commandant at Belsen
Camp going home for
the day with fumes of
human roast clinging
rebelliously to his hairy
nostrils will stop
at the wayside sweet-shop
and pick up a chocolate
for his tender offspring
waiting at home for Daddy's
return...

Praise bounteous
providence if you will
that grants even an ogre
a tiny glow-worm
tenderness encapsulated
in icy caverns of a cruel
heart or else despair
for in the very germ
of that kindred love is
lodged the perpetuity
of evil.

Chinua Achebe