You Must Set Forth at Dawn (65 page)

Never were hosts more gentle, more sensitive, self-retiring yet solicitous. The editor of the newspaper house, the sponsor of the conference, called on me. His brief stay was virtually soundless. In the most delicate manner, he indicated that the contents of the envelope that he was leaving on the table were for me to use in any way I wanted, that it was a gift of sympathy from his fellow executives who wished to ensure that I lacked nothing, yet were conscious of my likely preference to be alone. If I wished to look around the city, however, I only needed to inform the lady by the door and she would get in touch with his office. Even the choice of the young journalist who broke the news could not have been more deft. He looked more like a medical intern with a practiced bedside manner, tried to hide his astonishment (and relief) that I took the news so well. How was he to know that I had prepared myself, that I had left Auckland wondering only how soon the killing would be carried out? He tip-toed his way out, saying that he knew I would wish to be alone. Not that he forgot his calling—he left his card on the table by the door. If at any time I wished to make a statement, he would remain on call.

Being prepared for the worst is always one thing; confronting its stark actualization is another. There is a point at which the mind threatens to fold up, succumbing to its own destructive power of evocation. How does one erase the image of a friend and comrade suspended in the immense loneliness of a prison yard? This was worse than mere depletion. My human landscape appeared to me irremediably desecrated.

The laureates, when we finally gathered, were founts of humanity. Mikhail Gorbachev, architect of glasnost and perestroika, whom I was meeting for the first time, seemed awkward in his anxiety to offer solace. Mostly, he shook his head in bewilderment. “How could such a thing happen?” he repeated over and over. Was it really possible? Could a regime act with such brutality? And then, businesslike: “What should other governments, individuals, and organizations do?” About this he was specific—boycotts, sanctions, expulsion from world organizations—anything but platitudes! Gorbachev's horror was palpable. He was the first to sign the document of condemnation and call to action that I prepared and proposed to my colleagues as a collective reaction. All the laureates signed it, joined by our Japanese counterparts from various disciplines. This was one of the many posthumous resonances for Ken and his cause, but it was I who benefited from the therapy of having it vociferously adopted at the plenary gathering.

How ironic it seemed. Here was a product of the Soviet Union, which was once defined by—and still is sometimes inconceivable without—a Stalinist mentality. A product, perhaps even a sometime participant, in the operations of that most brutal era, the era of mock trials, banishments to arid wastelands, torture, forced psychiatric “medications,” executions that saw the end of so many artists, writers, thinkers, workers, and peasants—yet here he was, actually shaking his head in disbelief at the crime of a dictator in some distant land called Nigeria. Gorbachev, with the unusual signature patch of a red birthmark on his forehead, hamming it up with the Japanese, donning and strutting around in the “peace jacket”—or was it “love jacket”?—that was presented to each of us. And his ebullient wife, Raisa, basking in the approbation of a world that had faced down a totalitarian monstrosity whose internal collapse owed so much to the resolve and planning of her husband and his fellow conspirators. I spent most of my stay observing Gorbachev, a once-powerful lord of a wide swathe of the globe, for all the world at peace with himself, oblivious, to all appearances, or maybe simply reconciled, to the ironic fate of “the prophet that has no honor in his own land.” For by then, Mikhail Gorbachev's own people had turned on him. He was now fair game for every woe that had befallen the once-all-powerful nation, most especially its economic collapse. Greatly reduced in public reckoning, I thought, had become the great gift of liberty. The euphoria of freedom had all but evaporated within the Soviet Union.

The absurdities—albeit deadly—of ideological somersaults in the play of nations, the cruelties and absurdities of individual fates, all joined forces with personal self-revelations of that timely company—solemn, comic, self-mocking, an intercultural potpourri of experiences and futuristic schemes—to act as gradual restoratives to a battered psyche, contest its debilitation by ghosts of a horrific bereavement. I turned my mind to practical duties. The most efficacious antidote for grief—which I learned from the death of my friend Femi Johnson—comes in a practical conscription of the mind, its redirection toward some practical task, however distanced, but related. In Femi's case it had been quite simply the single-minded task of bringing his body home. I pursued his exhumation, accompanied him home from Frankfurt, and reinterred him in the cemetery of the Chapel of the Resurrection at the University of Ibadan. For Ken, not even knowledge of his remains was permitted; it was all classified, held close to the triumphalist chests of a predatory class, the military rulers. But his cause remained intact, one that, I quietly swore, we would someday bring to fruition.

Ken Saro-wiwa's death also served as a well-earned rebuke to my fatalism in exile. At least I enjoyed the freedom to go in search of a resting place, in case Abacha did succeed in fulfilling his plans for me. Saro-wiwa's relatives were not even permitted access to his body. Some reports claim that it took four attempts to hang him, others said it took more. What is undisputed is that the initial attempts failed, that he was taken down from the scaffold while his companions were executed, so that he witnessed it all and then took his turn.

I was left with the sense of a compulsive burden of debt to Ken, his companions, and their cause. Not even my long poem, written nearly a year after his death, “Calling Josef Brodsky for Ken Saro-wiwa,” which I failed twice, at Emory University and in Purcell Hall in London, to read to the end in public, overcome by emotion, seemed to discharge that burden. Indeed, both the title and subterfuge—fastening on Josef Brodsky, the Russian dissident poet, as a courier between Ken and me—was self-revealing....

I play
The simple messenger, dared thus far
To link two kindred souls from worlds apart
In passage to the other world

 

I had tried and failed to write to, for, in memory of, in homage to, in posthumous dialogue with Ken after his death, yet I needed to, needed to purge my psyche of yet another failure, one that, unlike the death of Moshood Abiola, had involved a desperate effort from the moment that I knew, with absolute certainty, that Abacha was resolved on Saro-wiwa's death. Dirging his end through another combative soul was the formula that finally worked.

The dismal proceedings of Kenule's murder in a Port Harcourt prison were videotaped on orders of the dictator, who held viewing sessions afterward with some of his officers, not all of whom knew in advance to what macabre feast they had been summoned. A witness has since revealed that one of the dictator's young aides fainted during a viewing. Abacha turned around and laughed. “Look at him,” he mocked, “and he calls himself a soldier.”

I am persuaded that I have always known that human aberrations such as Sani Abacha exist; I have learned to identify them since childhood, although, of course, mostly by intuition at that age. It is sufficient, a modest life mission, to ensure that such monsters do not enjoy the last laugh, do not rob individual beings of the fundamental right to a dignified life and a dignified exit, afflicting one's living thoughts with echoes of the brutal laughter of power over the courageous, farewell words of a fighter or the tread of triumphal boots that desecrate the peace of that rightful bequest from the cradle—the cactus patch.

“Lord, receive my soul,” Kenule Saro-wiwa shouted as he stepped on the scaffold, “but the struggle continues.”

Within such a commitment, I believe, is captured the essential teaching of that paradox, the Yoruba god of the restless road and creative solitude, the call of the lyric and the battle cry: Ogun.

Arms and the Man

NOW WE COME TO THE QUESTION: WOULD WE HAVE RESORTED TO ARMED struggle to rid the nation of the dictatorship of Sani Abacha? How does one come to terms with issues of pacifism and violence, make peace with their moral questions? Did we actually begin preparations for armed struggle?

The question of willingness to take up arms against a cruel despot was not one with which I found myself suddenly confronted. I had once resolved it in a minor mode during the Western Nigerian uprising of 1964–65, which had necessitated the takeover of the broadcasting station in Ibadan. Several within the opposition movement, however, found themselves faced with what, for me, was familiar though not fully settled territory. I have pondered numerous times the many faces of violence, its limpet attachment—it would seem—to the very genes of humanity. I could not deny its existence in some accommodating space within mine. I felt no special urge to pry it off and exclude it absolutely from the means of retrieval of a people's violated dignity, a community that defined my own existence as a human being. A monster had reduced us, collectively, to a plantation of slaves, and the word “liberation” could not be restricted to being a mere rhetorical device.

I was burdened with a special responsibility beyond mere leadership. Not many within the movement could claim to have been thrust, as I was, with an uncanny predilection, into situations that straddled the divide between peace and violence, compelling a constant review of the imperatives of both, each circumstance a unique instruction on its own. I had not escaped even the Irish “troubles.” During my stint as a fellow in Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1970, I was invited to lecture in Belfast at the very height of the violence. Our lodgings were situated on a street whose entry points were heavily sandbagged positions—in what had once been a normal, cozy neighborhood. I arrived at night, thus missing out on the sight of the fortifications. I woke up early the following morning—a Sunday—and sauntered out in all lordliness, little dreaming that eyes were watching me from behind curtains, taking note, passing on news of an intruder through the local bush telegraph. The streets were eerily empty, a sensation that eventually percolated through to me, even though I felt no particular alarm. I had, however, set up a panic among my hosts: a black face in the streets of Ireland, at that time in 1970, meant only one thing—a serving soldier in the British forces and thus fair game for the IRA. Search parties were immediately sent out, and later, we were formally informed that an IRA cell had been alerted.

A year or so later, I would find myself setting up a meeting between the Irish Provos and the “Regulars.” Only one and a third names have stuck to my memory from that experience: Seamus Towney and, the one-third, Mac-something. One side wanted a return to the violent days; the other was for a political solution. The two factions had just begun to tear each other apart, and an effort was being initiated, before the conflict became irreversible, to come to a resolution. During the run of
Les Anges Meurtriers
in Paris, Joan Littlewood, in whose Blackheath home I would sometimes meet not only the literary but the violent compatriots of the playwright Brendan Behan, asked me one day if I could find a safe house for the two factions in Paris. They had agreed to meet in secrecy and resolve their differences.

Through Nadia, the secretary to my Lumumba in Conor Cruise O'Brien's play, I secured an apartment just off Boulevard St.-Michel, owned by the daughter of the proprietor of one of the huge brasseries in that arrondissement, Titi C. It was all appropriately cloak-and-dagger. The Irish belligerents slipped away from under the nervous eyes of British agents, traveled on a cross-Channel ferry. The address had been sent to them in Ireland. On landing, they were informed in which letter box—that of an untenanted apartment— the key was hidden. Their meeting lasted nearly all night. By morning, they had boarded the ferry, headed for the Irish seas.

As I complained to Mary Robinson, then the Irish prime minister, when we met in Davos, Switzerland, two decades later, the intrusion of W.S. into Irish contemporary history had sunk into the Irish seas without a ripple. I had looked forward to the outcome as others might the result of a World Cup final, and to the private celebration of my unsung triumph—together with Nadia and Titi C.—in the cause of peace. Fortunately I had no active consciousness, at the time, of the existence of a Nobel Peace Prize, or I would have felt very badly done by when, not long after, the peace effort succumbed to the superior lure of bombs and guns. Unable to fire a public salvo at those fratricidal letdowns, I moped around for some days afterward and boycotted Irish literature and music for some weeks longer. Fortunately, I never had taken to Irish whisky.

To concede genuine revulsion at the phenomenon of violence does not, however, contradict an acceptance of its sometime necessity—and even justice. There are those who
relish
violence; there is no other word for it. They are juiced up at the prospect of its eruption, and some even consciously seek it out. Others merely reconcile themselves to violence but, having done so, direct it in as practical, minimalist, and humane a way as is compatible with the objectives, propelling it toward that moment when one may look back with relief at the jettisoning of such a phase that violates one's loftiest ideals, celebrate its termination, and hope—
Never again?

I have recognized and accepted my membership in this latter group since I became conscious of injustice and the tendency to domination as ingrained aspects of the conduct of society and individuals. I have always found it abnormal that violence should be offered as a normal commodity of exchange between individuals or that nations should conduct their diplomacy through the pulverization of one another's cities and the decimation of their populations. To gauge the greatness of nations—as my earliest history texts would have it—by their capacity and cunning for destruction and award the title of “Great” to successful warmongers in a confused context with nation building and social enhancement has always struck me—well, as far back as I can recollect—as a perversion of human values. To respond to terror with violence or attempt to defeat violence with its own instrumentality is, however, un-blameworthy. I admire the saints—the Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, the Dalai Lamas, the Aung San Suu Kyis, the Gautamas, and all—but I cannot aspire to companionship with them.

Many were the encounters I had with loving apologists of rabid power during the Abacha era, those who tried their best not to know of the violence that was meted out daily to their fellow citizens, often right before their eyes. The more daring made efforts to reassure me that the dictator was a much-misunderstood man who cared very deeply about the potholes in the roads—
Prof, I am not saying he's perfect, but you should see how he's been rehabilitating
the roads
—or else lauded his commitment to sanitizing the banking system—
Those mushroom banks, Prof, he's really putting an end to their activities
—and so on and so on and so on! Such encounters, often in airports or hotel lobbies during exile, never failed to call to mind one occasion in which I was physically caught up in the web of absurdity that is sometimes spun by violence. A common enough occurrence in domestic settings, this was acted out in the public arena. I have thought often of my interlocutors, the Abacha apologists while he lived, as actors in that street scene—they on the receiving end, our dictator as the natty young man who doled out that violence in the full confidence that he had a submissive partner, and a tolerant environment. That scene remains my favored morality tale, both as a moment of self-revelation—in addition to its cautionary lesson—and of my contempt for a tendency toward “reasoned” submissiveness or its partner, the psychologically induced, a probable masochistic streak.

AN EVENING—YES, I admit it—of egregious folly! New York, Upper Manhattan, 1970s. I was returning from some function or other in the company of my host, Joseph Okpaku, a trained engineer turned publisher, literary critic, and business adventurer from Benin, then domiciled in the United States. Joe was driving. A taxi overtook us, then swung sharply to the curb, screeching to a stop just a few yards from one of those apartment buildings with an awning and sidewalk carpet running from street to door, presided over by a stolid doorman in uniform, fully braided, at least an ex-boxer or -wrestler—in short, well able to take care of himself and any disturber of the peace. Before the taxi had rolled to a complete stop, the curbside door flew open and a woman leaped out, screaming at the top of her lungs and running—obviously—toward the protective presence of the doorman. After her leaped a man, who caught up with her in a couple of strides and pinned her against the wall. The taxi drove alongside the pair—perhaps, we thought, he still had his fare to collect. Joe had also pulled up, and together we watched.

“Get back in the car!” the man screamed at her. “No, no!” she screamed back. “Leave me alone! Help!”

The next sound we heard was the crunch of her head against the wall as the man took her face in his hands and bang, bang, bang against the wall. Over and over again went that head against that wall, as if the neck would snap. The man would stop briefly, step back, point, and order the woman once again to get back in the taxi. We watched in anticipation—that is, anticipation of help from the doorman. Nothing. He simply watched, stolidly.

The man grabbed her again, ready to resume his pounding, but the woman broke loose and fled screaming along the sidewalk, the man in pursuit. The taxi crawled alongside and we crawled behind it, still expecting the doorman to intervene. When her companion caught up with her again and resumed the same process, with such increased violence that I felt I could feel those bangs reverberate against the wall of my stomach, some unseen force must have lifted me out of the car and catapulted me forward, because the next thing I knew, I was standing over the man. I could only assume that I had knocked him down—from behind!

Well now, what next? Having knocked him down, what was I supposed to do? Had I gotten myself into a fight? Was Joe calling the police? Would the doorman at last act as a decent citizen and come to my aid? I dared not take my eyes off the fallen bully, dared not turn my back on him. I had no thought of doing anything to incapacitate him before he turned his fury on me, and I certainly could not leave him lying there while I regained the sanity and protection of Joe's vehicle. In short, I felt stuck, and I now began to feel stupid in the bargain. Not for long, however, since matters were taken out of my hands by a staccato of blows on my shoulders from behind. Reinforcements? From within the taxi? But no, the ownership of those tiny fists was soon established when I heard that earlier screaming voice now whining, “Don't you dare hurt him. I love him! I love him!”

My jaws began to lose their tautness. I felt my mouth distinctly slacken, opening slowly in silent questioning of my hearing. Now thoroughly scared, I hoped that the footsteps that I heard running up were Joe's, which indeed they were. The tattooing persisted, accompanied by increasing protestations of love. I dared not turn around, dared not take my eyes off the prostrate figure. I simply wished that the wind would whisk me away from that spot and deposit me in my Isara village, where human beings still conduct themselves with some measure of normality.

Recovering some volition, I bent over the man, all red lights flashing as my mind resumed functioning in the mode of extreme caution. There were passersby, quickening their pace as they skirted our group, and I believe that it was at that moment that I first became conscious that the surrounding humanity, including the three central figures—assailant, victim, and doorman spectator—were white. Solid pink-white upper-class Manhattanites. That is, I finally came down from the clouds of righteous and impulsive fellow feeling, landed plumb in the heart of habitual violence, the U.S.Alien land. Strange people! Until that moment, I had seen only three human beings, devoid of racial identity, one of whose head was about to be reduced to squashed melon. So I bent down, apologetic. My sole concern was now, very simply, self-preservation, and the instant question on my mind was—was Lover Boy carrying a knife? Or, worse yet, a gun?

I helped him up, tenderly, cooing contritely, my arms hooked under his armpits. Each hand took turns to dust him down so that he remained constantly half pinioned in a helpful manner. I felt no weapons. All the time, I uttered purring, conciliatory noises.

“My mistake, sir. You're not hurt, are you? Obvious misunderstanding. We were far away, misjudged the situation, you understand? Very, very clumsy of me . . .”

Lover Boy—straight from a tailor's fitting session, it seemed—ignored me, adjusted and smoothed down his jacket, and ordered his consort, “Get in the taxi!”

“That's it!” I eagerly concurred, ushering them both toward the taxi. Once they were inside, the door slammed against them, I took a giant step backward. “Take her home, please, and sir, beat her shitless. I mean, beat her to a shitty pulp.”