Putting things in order

Today a carpenter came, built shelves and hung a rod for my wardrobe. I am finally organized--boxes and suitcases and ghana-must-go bags now neatly stacked in the wardrobe where I will no longer stumble over them in the night when I can't find my torchlight. In the afternoon, after washing clothes, I sit and read articles about ethno-religious violence. Agarbatti incense twines through the room, wispy smoke swirling upward, like the jinn in Nazir Adam Salih's novel Zayyana. I say quiet Lenten prayers at maghariba, and after the stars come out, gwanin scriptwriter Nasir S. Gwangwazo, sarkin complex characterization and plots, comes and promises me a new script to read. After a year and a half, I have finally settled--a new bookcase, a new wardrobe, small pounded brass bowls and bits of pottery scattered about--a role to play. Everything is in place. I can't bear to think about ever leaving again. Alhamdu lillah. Allah ya kaimu gaba.

Nostalgia

Koko and kosai at Golden goose, then home in a dark taxi to a background of a crooning Bollywood track. I dream of years past, as a new moon floats faint above me

Excavation

Talatu has dug through the many layers to the very beginning, has set aside those little treasures, the happy moments that were truly, truly hers, and lets the other things rest where they lay, to be covered again by the ever-blowing dust. Allah ya ba da zaman lafiya. Amin.

Phone call from my father: on Jos

My dad calls me 5 minutes ago. He says "This thing has really exploded this morning. Much worse than last time. I have never heard so much gunfire in my life."

"It's all retaliation," he says. "It could spill over anywhere. No one is targeting us, but you never know. Someone who has just lost someone is not in their right mind. Just stay home today."

Every few seconds, he'd say "There's another one. Another shot. A heavy one."

"There is a 24 hour curfew. No one can go anywhere."

I ask him if there are refugees. He says not so many, mostly a lot of children at the house.

"There's another shot."

I tell him about the Martin Luther King sermon I read last night about "loving your enemy." "Do you have internet? I'll send it to you," I say.

"Ok. yes, That's what we need right now. You know this thing in Haiti, it's terrible, but there's nothing anyone could have done about it. But this. All of this retaliation.... " His voice is sad.

I tell him to text me if he needs more phone credit. I promise him reluctantly that I will stay at home.

God, help us.

5:34 pm: Links to articles about the most recent Jos Crisis:

(The most recent and most horrifying: http://234next.com/csp/cms

/sites/Next/Home/5514377-146/appeal_for_help.csp)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8468456.stm

http://234next.com/csp/cms/sites/Next/Home/5514254-146/plateau_governor_invokes_24_hour_curfew.csp

http://allafrica.com/stories/201001190555.html

http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5hWrSZmvk_k_nz58XcrcIx3B-r4AA

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/01/19/world/international-uk-nigeria-clashes.html?_r=1

For more background on the last Jos crisis in 2008 and some of the tensions behind it:

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/07/20/arbitrary-killings-security-forces

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2006/04/24/they-do-not-own-place

You can also go back to December 2008 on this blog to look at my posts on the last Jos crisis.

After shocks

Yesterday, after being away from internet and television for about four days, I found myself in the parlour of the house where I was being hosted in Kaduna, watching CNN coverage of the continuing devastation in Haiti. I cried. I am not as jaded, perhaps, as I would have been had I been watching it nonstop for the last four days. I was not yet glutted on the tragedy-scoops. The horrors of the earthquake in Haiti make all of the news of the past few months--the hysteria about the near miss with terrorism on Christmas Day (in which no one was actually killed), the madness over the disappearance of Nigeria's president--seem like children's quarrels. There are politics there, certainly. Peter Hallward points out in a Guardian article "Our role in Haiti," that

"Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti's agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums. Although there are no reliable statistics, hundreds of thousands of Port-au-Prince residents now live in desperately sub-standard informal housing, often perched precariously on the side of deforested ravines. The selection of the people living in such places and conditions is itself no more "natural" or accidental than the extent of the injuries they have suffered."

The poverty in Haiti is indicative of larger global injustices. I tried to donate online to relief efforts and couldn't because apparently the foundation I was trying to donate to would not accept money from an IPS in Nigeria. There are many ironies here--there are certainly many Nigerians who would like to join the global effort to help Haiti but even if our IP address were accepted what about global structures which mean that only those elite Nigerians who have lived abroad have access to credit cards? How do poor/rich people in Nigeria, labeled a "nation of interest" in the "war against terrorism" help earthshaken people in Haiti? Why is it that there were international volunteers working to save people trapped in hotels and not so many in ordinary homes? Why is it that the UN sent doctors back because they feared it wasn't safe? As if it is safe for anyone... for any of those people lying in tent hospitals because those hospitals that were already there had collapsed in the mindless thrust of the earth? The quake exposes global political fault lines as well as physical ones.

But ultimately, in the face of such great devastation, there is so little room left for outrage. The loss is too overwhelming. Human mistakes and squabbles and politics are dwarfed by the incomprehensible nature of the earth rising up and shaking down schools and homes and palaces--crushing children and mothers and teachers and politicians and journalists and UN representatives. Postal workers and cooks and students and grocers and doctors. There is no one to blame in these moments when the earth shakes but God himself. And yet what do we make of those hymns drifting out of the open parks where people are camped, homeless, and through news channels into the parlours of those of us in middleclass Nigeria, where the light has come back for a few hours, and we sit, and we watch, and we cry, and we listen. To the voices of those people singing who have lost everything, like the voices of those I woke to last November at 6am, women and children in our house, as Jos burned around us. Women and children and those young men, who were not yet patrolling, who had run with only small bags in their night clothes to the university. Refugees all. Singing.

A few hours later after I cried over the stories on CNN and we went to church and came back, my friend started receiving phone calls that there were problems in Jos. She is a student at the National Film Institute in Jos, and I had come to Kaduna with her and another mutual friend who is a Hausa film actor and director. For the next few hours we texted back and forth with family and friends in Jos. No one still seems quite sure what happened, but there is once again a 6pm to 6am curfew over Jos, and my parents tell of people our friends know who have died. Here are a few articles I've been able to find, from NEXT, BBC, and Al-Jazeera. And two more later articles from Next: "Police Restore Calm in Jos" and "Jos Residents Besiege Displaced Person's Camp." It seems that at root, it was a quarrel over land, over rebuilding a house that had been burnt in the last crisis. The feud spilled over into gangs wielding fire and machetes--destroying newly rebuilt buildings, killing the children who survived the killing last year. The skin slowly creeping over the wound is ripped open again. Once again it is Muslims against Christians and Christians against Muslims and "those Hausas always causing trouble," as the endless online commentary goes, so quick to assign blame to those who are not "us."

I am not in Jos now. It is hard not knowing what is going on. I remember last November but feel distant. I am not there. And there are no CNN stories showing families weeping over bodies.

When I come back to Kano and my laptop and go online, I discover that it is Martin Luther King Day in America, and a friend has posted part of this as her Facebook status update:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I try to find where the quote is from, and I find this 1957 sermon that apparently re-stated (pre-stated) much of what is in the quote (although not exactly): "Loving Your Enemies."

I am still trying to wrap my head around the connections here:

The violent rupture of the earth in an island nation not far from where i was born, the after shocks that heave and tremble long afterwards.

And the violent explosions born of both love of home and hatred for the other--all tied up in the earth and belonging and who owns what and who belongs where. It breaks, breaks, breaks across the land that divides north from south, the coast from the sahel. It threatens to break us all, and what do we have left? When will the light come back? How long can we keep singing?

"Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." This is the way the quote my friend posted ends, but in King's 1957 speech he continues, "Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction"

So do we end with love or do we end with destruction?

Can love overwhem hate?

Will it save us in the end?

Remembered Spaces

I took the bicycle from a child. He was heading into our garage to put away the ancient, used bike I had bought almost nine years ago. It was a heavy, man’s bike with a rod across the front. The child looked worried when I took it from him at the door. “It’s my uncle’s own,” he said. “I’ll not take it far,” I said. “I used to ride this years ago.”

I soon discovered that the hand brakes didn’t work and when you sat on the seat, it fell back pointing upwards toward the sky so that I had to balance on the tip of it to sit at all. But as I glided down the gravelly pot-holed university road between empty golden fields, heading for the photocopy shops near the hostels, I lifted my face to the distant mountains scaled with silver roofs, gazed out at the trees scattered occasional in long pastures stretching to the sky. “I’ve missed this,” I thought, “I have forgotten myself—that girl I once was.” Those long solitary walks under the open sky I’d take as a teenager—dreaming myself into a different world—down the road to the small waterfall that gushed over rock into the culvert and down to the river when the rains were heavy. I'd weave bouquets of golden flowers when the rains were at their end. And then in January days, when the veils of harmattan lifted—I'd gather dried arrangements to place in the vases brought home from ceramics class—dried red seed pods, half opened, feathery weeds, and hard prickly golden grass.

I was young and I loved the solitude—the rush of wind in the grass—the boulder strewn mountains. I lived half my life in another world—the world of princes and princesses and fairies and nymphs—I’d imagine the ghosts of great writers peering out at me from mirrors—guiding my pen with whispered words. Every once in a while I’d act out my story for myself, saying my lines with feeling, as if for a camera—as if my life were on film.

Sometimes I’d take a chair out to the driveway at night when NEPA left. There were not many generators on campus in those days and we did not use ours often, only candles and kerosene lamps, and it would be dark and silent with the steady thrum of the cicadas and barking of dogs around me. I’d lie back in the chair, our huge dog snuffling about, imagine myself lying in a boat of glass on a mirrored sea, stars above me, stars below me.

Those were the days when I was quiet and shy, and a bit of a dork. When my classmates were playing sports or going to parties, I was at home reading novels. I’d read far into the night with a candle balanced on my bed and wake at 2am with wax dripped all over my blanket. Those were the days when I knew Nigeria from the long trips I took with my family on the long hot roads between the flat green of Port Harcourt and the misty hills of Jos, from occasional trips to the market or to visits to churches where my dad would speak, from friends I had at our fenced in international school. I knew nothing of politics, other than the fact that here it was military and that we were all tense when there was a coup, and little of colonialism, though I devoured historical novels about World War II. I wandered through life dreaming of love and fame and all the beautiful things that I would do and be someday—in America or Europe or that imaginary world which I alone knew.

Those were the days before I fell in love with cities and crowds and subways and taxis and acabas. Before I learned to use makeup (though that knowledge is still shaky), before my ears were pierced, before I discovered the dramatic appeal of henna-ed hands. When the musicians I knew were my brother’s friends—my popular brother was the one who went on the radio every week with his rock and roll show and was the cool young guitarist in a band full of my classmates. I admired his life, and I’d imagine myself in his world, but I was too shy for it. I wanted to act in school plays, as I had as a young child, but I froze with terror at my first audition and didn’t go back for three years—it was not until my final year that I launched with gusto into my minor role as a frosty upper class mother-in-law. Those days I spoke no more Hausa than “ina kwana?” and Nigeria was slightly out of focus, veiled behind the mists of harmattan.

I loved deeply then, but I did not know what I loved. I loved my dreams. I loved my imagination. I loved those characters I read of in novels, or saw in films, or created in my head. But with real encounters, my imaginary characters slipped away. Everytime I returned to this country, the focus became clearer. I left the international school behind and made friends at the university, with authors and writers and poets. As the language began to come, I heard those things that had all seemed like a dreamy blur before. It was like tuning a radio, with the static giving way to the warmth of words. I discovered novels in Hausa. Films in Hausa. Writers, actors, musicians who live their lives in Hausa. A whole great world, that I had never known was there. Life began to burst characters, real ones, real people I could talk to—when I too could speak Hausa. I became less dreamy and more alive—I began to lose my imagined stories, because the ones around me were so much more urgent and interesting. I laughed and loved and sped around town on acabas—even acted a little bit. When I was young, my love was so dreamy, so imaginary, and now it was real and full and dancing with life. Real words spoken, not just imagined, a real face there smiling and laughing at me, not just wished for. I no longer liked being alone. I could no longer sit at home happy with a book. My loved solitude came now when I rode on motorcycles at night with my face lifted to the wind.

And yet, with all these things I gained, I forgot that part of myself that needs to walk alone through golden grass and just be silent. I forgot that part of myself that desperately needs to feel starlight on my skin. And of course, here, these things are harder after the armed robbers come, harder when we lock the door firmly at first dusk. Harder when you are now faced with the seductive siren’s song of the internet, and its crowded pages of friends and pseudo-friends, where you are never alone but never satisfied. The internet calls endlessly until you are frozen into repetitive meaningless checking of email and facebook and blog stats, until you come close to destroying yourself, dashing yourself against the pages of those who no longer love you, unable to read, unable to create, unable to think. Frozen by basilisk eyes but yet drawn ever forward by the promising song and beautiful faces in a tag parade of endless photos.

Biking today to photocopy my research consent forms, with the silent university spread out around me, the fields stretching out in every direction, solitary and quiet with palms and baby baobabs rising from the furrows, I thought I must return to this more—come out on this borrowed bike. I am no longer that shy, awkward girl, though sometimes she rises up in me. I no longer wish to be her, but I do miss her belief in her dreams. I must re-awaken my love of solitary beauty. I have forgotten a part of myself that I shouldn’t have. I have lost part of myself that I need to find again. I have recently come close to breaking myself. I have grown louder and more outspoken, fiery but brittle—I need this silence to remember that my strength is that I can bend, like a palm in the wind. I will not break. I can be alone, I can be still. I can listen. I can be strong. I can find joy in the hills and in the grass, and the calls of the children to me as I wheel the bike back over the culvert and towards the garage. “Aunty, Aunty, I tried to follow you but I couldn’t see you again. Where did you go, Aunty? Where did you go?”

Meditation

This is a series of readings I have done today, from first reading the chapters around yesterday’s Psalm (much needed reminder that sweet passionate David, the man “after God’s own heart” was as human and fallible as me)---then free associating as my memory leads to other sacred texts, hymns and prayers from the Anglican, Methodist, Catholic and Greek Orthodox tradition. In the middle, I re-read C.S. Lewis’s perfect little spiritual-novel The Great Divorce, which I have to read at least once a year to revive my imagination and remind me of why I have the faith that I do.

Psalm 143

A Psalm of David

O Lord, hear my prayer,

Listen to my cry for mercy;

In your faithfulness and righteousness

come to my relief.

Do not bring your servant into judgment,

for no one living is righteous before you.

The enemy pursues me,

he crushes me to the ground;

he makes me dwell in darkness

like those long dead.

So my spirit grows faint within me;

my heart within me is dismayed.

I remember the days of long ago;

I meditate on all your works

And consider what your hands have done.

I spread out my hands to you;

my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.

Selah

Answer me quickly, O Lord;

my spirit fails.

Do not hide your face from me

or I will be like those who go down to the pit.

Let the morning bring me word of your

unfailing love,

for I have put my trust in you.

Show me the way I should go,

for to you I lift up my soul.

Rescue me from my enemies, O Lord,

for I hide myself in you.

Teach me to do your will,

for you are my God;

may your good Spirit

lead me on level ground.

For your name’s sake, O Lord, preserve my life;

in your righteousness, bring me out of trouble.

In your unfailing love, silence my enemies;

destroy all my foes,

for I am your servant.

HYMN:

Come thou Fount of Every Blessing

Robert Robinson, 1758

Come, Thou Fount of every blessing,
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.

Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.

Psalm 139

For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.

O Lord you have searched me

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

Before a word is on my tongue

you know it completely, O Lord.

You hem me in—behind and before;

you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me

and the light becomes night around me,”

even the darkness will not be dark to you;

the night will shine like the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

For you created my inmost being;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you because I am fearfully and

wonderfully made;

Your works are wonderful,

I know that full well.

My frame was not hidden from you

when I was made in the secret place.

When I was woven together in the depths

of the earth,

your eyes saw my unformed body.

All the days ordained for me

were written in your book

before one of them came to be.

How precious to me are your thoughts,

O God!

How vast is the sum of them!

Were I to count them,

they would outnumber the grains of sand.

When I awake,

I am still with you.

If only you would slay the wicked, O God!

Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!

They speak of you with evil intent;

your adversaries misuse your name.

Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord,

and abhor those who rise up against you?

I have nothing but hatred for them;

I count them my enemies.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

PRAYER OF PENTINENCE

Most merciful God,

Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

we confess that we have sinned

in thought, word and deed.

We have not loved you with our whole heart.

We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves.

In your mercy

forgive what we have been,

help us to amend what we are,

and direct what we shall be;

that we may do justly,

love mercy,

and walk humbly with you, our God. Amen.

May the God of love and power

forgive you and free you from your sins,

heal and strengthen you by his Spirit,

and raise you to new life in Christ our Lord. Amen.

Anglican Prayers of the People

I Corinthians 12:31- 13

Of Saint Paul:

And now I will show you the most excellent way.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Me:

So often we speak of love as an attribute, a characteristic. And it is, but it is more. It is also the very Nature of God. We long to love, and in that longing, we long for God. For he is Love.

From I John 4

Of Saint John

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loves us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

I John4:7-12

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. “

I John 4:16b-18

HYMN:

Charles Wesley, 1747

“Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”

Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven to earth come down;
Fix in us thy humble dwelling;
All thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus, Thou art all compassion,
Pure unbounded love Thou art;
Visit us with Thy salvation;
Enter every trembling heart.

Breathe, O breathe Thy loving Spirit,
Into every troubled breast!
Let us all in Thee inherit;
Let us find that second rest.
Take away our bent to sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
End of faith, as its Beginning,
Set our hearts at liberty.

Come, Almighty to deliver,
Let us all Thy life receive;
Suddenly return and never,
Never more Thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
Serve Thee as Thy hosts above,
Pray and praise Thee without ceasing,
Glory in Thy perfect love.

Finish, then, Thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see Thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in Thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before Thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

Lord, have mercy.

Christ have mercy.

Lord have mercy.

Glory to God in the highest,

Glory to God in the highest

and peace to his people on earth.

Lord God, heavenly King,

almighty God and Father,

we worship you, we give you thanks,

we praise you for your glory.

Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father,

Lord God, Lamb of God,

you take away the sin of the world:

have mercy on us;

you are seated at the right hand of the Father:

receive our prayer.

For you alone are the Holy One,

you alone are the Lord,

you alone are the Most High,

Jesus Christ,

with the Holy Spirit,

in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

paradoxes

October 5

My sun is gone and I am cold and gray

October 6

And after the sun leaves, there are the long dark walks. The sharp wind carries away all thought, and I am cold and clean and empty.

October 13

I walk again in the dark--skin pricked with cold, yet I am warm. What is lost feels nearer than before, what is given up lingers in my smile, what I possess no more fills the cold night. Longing hushed, presence overwhelms me. In the dark, light glows beneath my eyelids. In the cold, warmth radiates out of me.

Those old Sufi poets knew this--when they sang of their beloved, Spirit beyond flesh. Those theologians of the early church with their allegories, who saw Deity between the lines of the lover. Solomon's Shulamite made God.

He is gone, yet He is here. No longer mine, he is Everywhere.

Love fills the night, so that the darkness is yet another aspect of light, the cold so that frozen air is yet another side of warmth.

I leave behind the whispering of the sky and the wind and the trees, yet the wonder stays with me.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī says:

All through eternity
Beauty unveils His exquisite form
in the solitude of nothingness;
He holds a mirror to His Face
and beholds His own beauty.

He is the knower and the known,
the seer and the seen;
No eye but His own
has ever looked upon this Universe.

His every quality finds an expression:
Eternity becomes the verdant field of Time and Space;
Love, the life-giving garden of this world.

Every branch and leaf and fruit
Reveals an aspect of His perfection.
The cypress give hint of His majesty,
The rose gives tidings of His beauty.

Whenever Beauty looks,
Love is also there;
Whenever beauty shows a rosy cheek
Love lights Her fire from that flame.

When beauty dwells in the dark folds of night
Love comes and finds a heart
entangled in tresses.

Beauty and Love are as body and soul.
Beauty is the mine, Love is the diamond.

They have together since the beginning of time-
Side by side, step by step.

--



This is love:
to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First, to let go of life.
In the end, to take a step without feet;
to regard this world as invisible,
and to disregard what appears to be the self.

Heart, I said, what a gift it has been
to enter this circle of lovers,
to see beyond seeing itself,
to reach and feel within the breast.

From:
The Divani Shamsi Tabriz, XII

from http://www.mikeshane.org/rumi/rumi_lovepoems.htm#This_is_love

Helen Keller moments in language learning OR your mother's admonition ("Don't swear...")

Today while reading a brand new and brilliant (though I'm sure it will be very controversial and hotly contested) book by Rudolf Pell Gaudio, Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City about 'yan daudu culture in Kano, I realized something about my language-use that I had never quite noticed before. So, I'm sure the following confession will make all of you Hausa-speakers snigger at me... But... I LOVE the zesty gusto of the expression "Zan ci ubanka..." or "uwarka" and have been using it here and there in a joking manner for the past few months. Now, I knew this was coarse and improper language about other people's parents, but I had never sat down and literally translated the expression--though I should have.  I have mostly heard it in playful contexts in which people are teasing each other or abusing someone they are angry at. 

I realized while reading Gaudio's linguistic explanations of certain language used among the 'yan daudu community (and elsewhere), that I had been going about saying literally, "I will fuck your father...." 

Yes, laugh, laugh.

I knew it wasn't proper, but when I realized this afternoon actually linguistically what I had been saying... ai... I think I will try not to say it anymore... (lol) 

I remember the first time I used it in the presence of a filmmaker who has probably used the expression plenty of times himself, he flinched. I should have known then that this Hausa is too "deep for me..." Ku yi hakuri....

Armed Robbers... But we are all fine...

I don't want to write very much write now. I will probably write more privately and then share what I can publically later. But, just to let those of you who follow this blog know, my family and some friends were attacked by armed robbers last night around 9pm in my parent's house. We are all fine. They did not harm anyone physically except for my father whom they shot at from about 5 inches away (it must have been a blank or a cap gun because he was not wounded) and then kicked in the mouth. He sustained only minor bruises and scratches. The rest of us in the house, my sister T. and her friend B., my mother, the PhD from the U.S. who is staying with them K., and two little girls from across the street are all fine. The whole ordeal only lasted about 20 minutes although it felt like much longer. Fortunately, our neighbors heard the first gunshot and the robbers shouting at us to lie down on the floor. They called the mobile police/soldiers who came a little while later. The soldiers shot at the robbers who ran away on foot. 

We are all fine. We have actually been laughing ever since they left. 

There is so much to laugh about. There is so much to be thankful for. 

They took a few things but left us all intact, which is the most important thing.

I will post more as I can.

Thank you for your prayers.

T-C

Yonder breaks the new and glorious morn

I must admit I have recently been worried about what I can post on this blog. I am discovering more and more people who are following it (either the occasional drop-in or the avid “follower” who I assume gets an email when I make a new post), all of them from very different backgrounds. They say write for your audience, but I’ve got a funny audience. I’ve got Nigerians from the South and Nigerians from the North. I’ve got Americans and a few Europeans. I’ve got academics. I’ve got atheists and agnostics. I’ve got Buddhists. I’ve got Muslims and evangelical Christians, Catholics, Pentecostals. Politically conservative and politically radical. I’ve got people I’ve known since high school, and people I’ve never met except through their comments on my blog. So when I “write what I’m thinking” (the meaning of the title of this blog in Hausa) how careful do I need to be? Can I just write what I want or do I need to issue disclaimers on everything?

I remember the advice of an old poetry professor who said you can’t think about what your family (or others) will think when you write, you just have to write what is true to yourself. But as an academic, I also have a little critic crouched on my shoulder, repeating back to me what my various readers might say to themselves. I worry about the ethics of being “true to myself” when it involves writing about other people or even writing about what I’m thinking. I can’t write as freely as I could if I were writing poetry, which has a certain limited audience, and in the age of internet these posts are far more accessible than my poems ever would have been.

Maybe I should start giving Victorian-type titles or chapter descriptions, and people can choose whether to read it or not.

This one will be:

“A Very Long and Personal Post In which Talatu-Carmen Worries about her Audience and then Muses about the Original Christmas and Christianity in Relation to the Jos Crisis.”

“O Holy Night”

I have been thinking during this Christmas season about refugees and displaced people, poverty and war, about indigenes and settlers and politics. About how many similarities there are between the nativity story and about life here now. Christmas carols leap to life: the darkness of the earth and the sudden burst of joy, the supernatural promise of peace and how “tidings of great joy” were brought to the wretched of the earth—shepherds, peasants, a poor carpenter and his young bride who were moved by imperial decree back to their place of “origin.”

Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem, outposts in an imperial province. Arrogant Roman soldiers patrolling the streets. Rebels in the hills. The corrupt incestuous Herod family who assassinated each other and who would order the death of children to secure a political post.

In the village of Nazareth there is a young girl promised in marriage. In a Judean town there is the barren wife of a priest. Suddenly the virgin and the old woman are impossibly filled with life.

The rhythm quickens.

A carpenter is heart broken by what seems to be the girl’s betrayal. The old woman believes her, knows, when her own child leaps within her, the mysterious burden her young cousin is carrying before she says a word. Angels come down in dreams. The carpenter believes.

The rhythm quickens.

There is an imperial degree that “settlers” should go back to their place of origin to be counted. A government census is declared. Villagers mutter about the government exercise being a good excuse for officials to take extra kickbacks. What choice do they have? What control do they have over their lives? The carpenter sets off on foot with his tough pregnant little bride for the hundred mile journey. It has been long since his parents or his grandparents had left Bethlehem. There are no family, no friends that they know well enough to stay with. The town is chock full of lost, short tempered pilgrims back in what Rome calls their homeland, and there is no room for hire in the inn. The carpenter and this pregnant teenager must settle for someone’s charity, a room in a poor man’s house where the animals wander in and out, or a stable near the fields.

This is not how most women give birth for the first time. This is not how it is supposed to happen. Mary had seen her cousins give birth, with family around them, sisters and mothers and neighborhood midwives. In Nazareth there would have been clean, soft newly sewn cloths to wrap the baby in. But here she is like a refugee, in a strange town. The only familiar person is this man her parents arranged for her to marry, this man she has only just begun to know. This place they have settled is dirty. Goats and sheep and chickens wander in and out. She does not know where women go to bathe or ease themselves. She is not sure where to find water to wash her clothes. Joseph is an “indigene” of this place, but he knows no one. She had never been in this small dusty village before, although both of their ancestors were buried here.

They are dark days, brutal soldiers, corrupt tax collectors, armed robbers plaguing travelers on the roads. People are suspicious of each other. Rumours fly faster than imperial messengers bringing declarations of new taxes. The Judeans hate the Samaritans and the Samaritans hate the Judeans. The king is a despised Edomite placed in power by colonial overlords. He builds a palace on a distant rock and neglects security and the repair of roads. Religious leaders proclaim their righteousness in the streets, making great displays of their money, while their own parents starve.

The contractions come closer and closer together.

Yet there is this mystery, this insane promise made by angels that makes the tired dirty young couple glow and wonder.

This is the transcendent mystery of Christmas.

The moment of the birth when the earth exploded and all the laws of nature spun topsy turvy.

We Christians believe that God himself was born that cold dusty night in Bethlehem. That God himself burst into the world in the poorest of conditions, to tired displaced peasants who could not even comfort themselves with the warmth of home or family. It is incomprehensible to us—how such a thing could happen. Incarnation--the depth of humility in which the Creator of the Universe sank to emerge into his own creation—as if the author of a book suddenly entered its flat pages or an embroiderer sewed herself into the fabric of her art. The degree of difference between the Roman emporer and the road-weary paupers suddenly becomes miniscule. All the gold and silks and great marble palaces suddenly seem cheap and gaudy compared to what the poorest of the poor saw that night in the dusty ancestral home of David.

The world began to explode around them. The earth could not contain this limitless Being. The night sky burst with light of Presence, just as 33 years later the day would grow dark with Absence.

Shepherds, with their sheep and cattle huddled around them, staggered backwards as the night sky cracked open and stars poured down and music from outside the universe spilled in through the rupture. And it was they, a teenage girl and the manual labourer who married her, shepherds with handwoven hats and cracked heels who first felt the joy. It rippled out from there, an old man and an old woman in the temple who had waited their whole lives to see the prophecy fulfilled, foreign scholars from the East who came on camels bearing gifts for a king, the peasants of Egypt who watched the child as he grew long and slim and began to walk.

And those he touched as he proceeded towards his death: religious leaders, politicians and prostitutes, tax collectors and thieves, fishermen and soldiers, the blind and the epileptic, beggars and rebels, Jews and their hated relatives the Samaritans, colonial Roman overlords, Egyptians, and visitors from the East, those who worshiped him and those who spat on him.

The light of dawn bursts out and the darkness cannot hide it.

But there is so, so much that is wrong—good ripples out and the evil bunches up into pockets of atrocity. The small dusty town of Bethlehem witnesses the birth of an impossible Child, both an indigene and settler, human and God, Creator stitched into his own creation, and the king orders the death of dozens of other children. (How hard it is for a rich man, a ruler of an earthly province, to see the kingdom of God breaking around him like a tidal wave! It is invisible to him)

He thinks he is safe now, protected, like Pharaoh, from children who would usurp him. The Great One dies only months after he thinks he has secured his throne. His son Herod takes his brother’s wife, sneaks into her teenage daughter’s room when he thinks she’s not looking. He is driven mad by nightmares of the prophet he has beheaded yet approves another to be crucified. Another son Herod is consumed by worms that came from inside of him and eat him alive.

Now two thousand years later, these Herods still scheme, unaware of the worms that are eating them alive. They pick schoolgirls off the streets, vacation in Rome with money extorted from peasants, secure bank accounts run by distant colonial lords, pay mercenaries to kill children in the street. The worms eat them. And poor beleaguered people, who keep having to leave their homes, who grow used to gun-wielding soldiers on the roads, are still dazzled with joy at the memory of the song that drifted into our world that winter’s night.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit for they shall see the kingdom of God.”

There is such darkness in the world, and yet there is this unexplained spirit, this beauty that keeps blinding us. We keep surviving. I don’t understand it. But there it is.

Long lay the world, in sin and error pining
Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope
The weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks
A new and glorious morn
Fall on your knees
O hear the angel’s voices
O night divine
O night when Christ was born


Glory to God in the highest
And on earth peace

**
“O Come, O Come Emmanuel”

I came into Jos from Kano last week in a taxi full of Hausas from Angowar Rogo. “Kuna Jos lokacin da rigima? Were you in Jos during the crisis?” I ask the two women sitting beside me, as we left Kano. “I, wallahi,” they say beginning to exchange stories of huddling in their houses with their children and other refugees. Coming into Jos, I am stricken by what I see on the road, on the north side of town—what I did not see before because I flew out of the airport in Jos South to Lagos the Wednesday after the crisis. There the blackened outline of the sprawling school for Islamic higher education and another burnt school just before we got to Farin Gada. Rows of burnt and roofless houses and shops. As we pass, I see men bowed in prayer, filling the burnt hull of a mosque. The walls are blackened and broken down on two sides yet they bow, they pray to God.

“There is so much we did not see. There is so much we did not know.” I think. “All we saw were the churches.”

Two days to Christmas, I drive with my parents through Tudan Wada, Katako Market, and Angowar Rogo, taking shortcuts to try to get home before the curfew. Whole streets of shops lie in blackened ruins. They belong to both Christians and Muslims, but the deepest devastation is in Muslim areas.

I read the 2006 Human Rights Watch report on the indigin/settler problem in Nigeria. I'm sure they are oversimplifying some things, but how had I not known that a student could not enter any university in Nigeria without an indigin certificate from somewhere—that there are thousands and thousands of Nigerians caught between here and there, between where they’ve “settled” and their supposed “homeland” where they cannot get indigene certificates either? People who can’t get into schools, can’t get government jobs, who are seen as “settlers” wherever they go? When Jos Hausas go to Kano to make movies they are seen as being “Jos people” coming to corrupt Hausa culture. When they stay in Jos, politicians tell them to go back to where they came from.

Friends (Plateau indigenes and Christians at that) explain details of the elections—how egregiously the elections seem to have been rigged in favour of “indigene” politicians preaching a gospel of protectionism.

Onward Christian Soldiers
Marching into war

One friend tells me he was out at a night spot Thursday night of the election and heard reports from people drifting in that the ANPP candidate has won by a landslide. Then somehow PDP was reported to have won. He tells me about how people on the middle class compound, where most of his neighbors have a university degree, “began to turn into animals before my eyes.” Christians who wanted to kill the few Muslim families who lived on the compound, who only days earlier they were visiting and watching videos with. Young men, his friends from childhood, who called him to come with them to kill and old Hausa man who takes care of horses. Teenage boys and girls who beat to death a Hausa boy who fell off a passing lorry.

This is what Christians have done.

In the name of Christ.

The Prince of Peace.

I begin to understand one of my friends, a Plateau indigene, who converted from Christianity to Islam because of what he saw in the church.

Yet the other stories remain. The “Hausa Muslim” boys who burned churches at 6am on Friday morning, who pulled people out of taxis as they passed on the road and cut off old women’s hands. The Christian girl living behind a nightclub who used her phone to video the mob of young men trying to beat down her door. These stories sit there beside the stories about the young Christian men who killed a fellow Christian night guard who tried to keep his Muslim employer’s property from being burned, beside the stories of young “Christian” men who began to call their friend a traitor when he wouldn’t come with them to kill.

And then there are the stories of what the soldiers did. Christian and Muslim soldiers. Mowing down the young.

Christian. Muslim.
Indigene. Settler.
Fake Soldiers.
Real Soldiers.
Guns. Machetes.
Burned church.
Burned mosque.
Markets burned three weeks before Christmas.


This is the world that Christmas comes to.

The woman at Katako Market from whom my mother bought glass and pitcher sets before the crisis. Her neighbor gives her a few plastic buckets to hang outside the blackened remains of her shop to start over again.

The old Christian Igbo woman whose irrigation pumps are burned during the crisis, who keeps her fields green when her Hausa Muslim neighbors loan her their pumps when they have finished watering their fields.

Christmas comes upon us, unexpected, while houses are still buried in rubble, and refugees whose homes were burned still camp in relatives' houses.

Today, Sunday, the Sunday after Christmas, the last Sunday before the new year, we go to the small cement block community hall where Emmanuel Baptist church is meeting while they wait to begin rebuilding their church for the third time. There are a few streamers and balloons hanging from the ceiling and letters spelling out “Happy X-mas” hung haphazardly on the walls. Women and children greet us warmly. Little girls call out “Aunty Talatu.” The children sit on the floor at the front, while adults squeeze onto benches propped up on stones.

“I’m not happy that we don’t have enough chairs” said the pastor in Hausa, waving the children to the front. He was smiling.

He and his family had gone to the wildlife park with their three children and two foster daughters a week after the crisis to give the children a vacation. While there, they were robbed at gunpoint by men who lay them on their faces and searched in their pockets and purses, said they would kill the children if they did not cooperate.

These are the people who slept on our floors and who sat outside to eat paltry bowls of badly seasoned rice for four or five days. Who had to take baths in cups of water in our bathroom without a drain.

I should not have been surprised by the joy I saw on their faces today. Two days after the crisis started when their service was held at our house, with girls dressed in jeans and mothers in mismatched wrappers, they still sang and danced. They still woke at 5am each morning to pray and sing.

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel,
Shall come to thee, o Israel

Now they wore lace. Their shocked anger had given way to thanksgiving. Most families had gone back to their neighborhoods, to rebuild relationships with old neighbors.

The service is in Hausa. A man comes to the front to exhort the church to remember how Jesus said “If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic.” He prayed that those whose homes had been burned would be given another. The assistant pastor, an elderly man whose house was burned, leads the singing.

After the exhortations, there are two occasions to celebrate: a baby dedication, and a thanksgiving for a couple married two days before.

The baby girl is prayed over. The drummer beats a danceable rhythm on the newly donated drums. People dance and sing and laugh, laugh, laugh.

The groom, an architect, had been married before. His wife lost their first baby in childbirth. On the road from the village where she had gone to recover, she and her sister were killed in a car accident. Now, two years later, he has married again. The bride smiles and dances as we bring up another offering. The young couple pledges to donate N5000 to help the church buy new chairs. After the service, they pass out a crate of minerals.

So many new beginnings.

See these people who keep coming back.

O come to earth
Abide with us
Our Lord, Emmanuel

The church is a bright bird, bursting out of the flames.

Reborn again and again.

Through the fire and the smoke. Through the gunfire and the raging mobs and the hungry roads and angry robbers.

***
There are those who politic in God’s name.

Those who kill in God’s name.

Those who steal in God’s name.

Those who take revenge in God’s name.

Those who demonize their neighbor in God’s name.

And you can call them Christians and Muslims if you like.

And call it a religious crisis if you like.

A holy war if you like.

If that is what you think God is like.

***
O Come thou rod of Jesse free
Thy home from Satan’s tyranny
From depths of hell thy people save
And give them victory o’er the grave
Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel”
***


But this is what I saw today: Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Gentleness. Self Control.

Angry shock given way to joyful forgiveness.

And this is what I heard, at the end, after we had danced and sung for the bride and the groom and the child.

“May the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the sweet fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us now and forever more.

Surely goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives, and we will dwell in the house of the Lord, forever.

The church is named Emmanuel:

God is with us.

The Inevitable Lost Phone: An sace wayata

Coming back from the Association of Nigerian Authors convention, hosted in Gusau, Zamfara State (which I'll try to write more on later), I lost my handset, which was subsequently stolen in the process of me trying to find it....

So, for those of you who read this blog and know I have your number, could you send me an email with your number? Alternatively, you can try texting or phoning me in about two days once I have swapped the line and bought a new phone.

So, now I have joined the legions of others with this problem. It's so painful... arghh... The phone was the cheapest available model. I paid N3500 for it (about $30)--the thief probably won't get more than N500 for it. I would be happy to pay triple that amount to get the hundreds of numbers back.... But, alas, after about ten minutes, the ringing stopped and the network said it was switched off, likely the sim card already abandoned in a ditch.

Wayyo....

My one consolation is that I have this slightly obsessive/compulsive habit of typing up important text messages before I delete them (I used to copy numbers from the texts but I stopped doing that about a month ago; I will henceforth start doing it again), and I had copied down every number in my phone two years ago when I left, so the main numbers I need are the ones I've collected in the past five months.... which are substantial.

So, to those who know me in my real life and not just my blog, please send me your numbers....