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ED HERMAN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures, featuring talks by poets, scholars and educators, presented by Poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear Matthew Shenoda speaking with Chris Abani, about poetry in Nigeria, the oral and religious traditions in African poetry, and the one-sided conversation between African and European poets.

Chris Abani was born and raised in Nigeria during the country's rule by military dictators. His first novel, Masters of the Board, was published when he was still a teenager and landed him in prison. After two additional stints in prison for his politically charged writings, during which Abani witnessed horrific brutalities, as he and other prisoners were routinely tortured, Abani escaped to England, where he earned an MA in English from the University of London. In 1999, he settled in the United States, earning a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. A devout Christian, Abani's faith also incorporates traditional African beliefs, accepting the contradictions and vagaries of the universe in flux.

As such, his writing has a sense of hope and optimism, even when dealing with cruelty and loss. Abani has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN USA Freedom to Write Award, and numerous other awards. He is currently a professor at the University of California, Riverside. Matthew Shenoda is an award-winning writer who has taught and lectured extensively in the fields of Ethnic Studies and Creative Writing. He is currently Associate Dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College in Chicago. This conversation took place at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, in March 2013. We'll hear Chris Abani read from his own work and from other Nigerian poets. We begin with Abani giving an overview of the history of poetry in Nigeria and describing the importance of oral traditions and religious beliefs in African poetry.

CHRIS ABANI:
To talk about poetry, in Africa as a whole actually, but in Nigeria, you have to go back to the notion of the oral poet. And someone like Isidore Okpewho in books like Epic in African and Myth in Africa has set that up. So it's a good resource if people want to look at that. But, Nigeria is an interesting place because it seems that geographically the arts fall out in certain ways. So, the Igbos of the eastern parts of Nigeria tend to produce more novelists, I don't know why that is. And in the western parts, in the Yoruba cultures, they produce more playwrights and poets. I think it's because Yoruba has had much more developed empires and empire tends to generate, as it were, you know, griots. So the orality, kind of really you can see most effectively in Yoruba tradition, particularly in the religious tradition. In Ifa, which is the traditional religion of the Yoruba, you'll find what were called Oriki. Oriki are praise poems. And so Orunmila, who's the deity of wisdom, you'd have a praise poem that begins something like, Orunmila (SPEAKS IN YORUBA).

So, you tend to find that, even within the tonal language that it is, it still seems to follow almost an iambic beat, because it's kind of spoken. You then have the particular parts of Ifa, which is really a corpus of religious study, the holy book as it were, and some parts will be written down. There's a beautiful book by Wande Abimbola, Professor Abimbola, that collects Ifa verses. But largely it's an oral system. And so Ifa essentially translates as the word of god. And so there are all these short verses that appear in divinations and so forth, and they follow a very particular order and you can find that breakdown in Abimbola's book. But again, beautiful, short, almost psalm-like verses. So, you have one about water, which is... (SPEAKS IN YORUBA), which literally translates as the raging torrent is the diviner for water. When water was coming into the world and he, water said, shall I be wealthy? And he was asked to perform sacrifice. Now, wherever a drop of water falls, it becomes an ocean.

Wherever a drop of water falls, a wealth of a city grows, wherever a drop of water falls, it becomes an ocean. And so you sort of see this beautiful stuff happening, even also with Ifa, there's a system of call and response called Igere. And so you would have the lead poet sort of go, (SPEAKS IN YORUBA) and everybody will go (SPEAKS IN YORUBA). And he will say like, (SPEAKS IN YORUBA). You know, so it's a beautiful system in that way. And then you have the poetry of the deity called Ogun, who is essentially the deity of iron, that deity of war, civilization, of innovation, but more interestingly enough, of poets. So it's really interesting that the god of war is actually the god of poets. The form around the poems and the poetry around Ogun are fascinating. They're called Ajala, and they're the most free verse style because essentially, unlike Oriki, and Igere and Ifa verses that are fixed in their structure, the only variation would be in how you deliver them in terms of slow, fast, quick, short, Ajala is completely internally improvised.

So, there are just very loose parameters. So every performance is never the same. Even when the poet starts, it's a beautiful system. Then you go to other, I suppose, poetic devices in the idea of proverbs, because every proverb is an elision. Even names in Igbo and Yoruba are shortened forms of sentences and stories in a way. Then you also have actual oral epics. And in Nigeria, and I think one of the few, the only main one I think that's been transcribed into prose is called The Ozidi Saga, and is translated by J.P. Clark, John Pepper Clark. So, that kind of takes you, sort of let's say, let's just say, from the beginning of time to 1920. If you then start to look at what I will call the pre-independence and early independent Nigeria, which is about 1920 to 1966, we have printing presses. So we have the emergence of traditional literatures. And the poets that kind of occupy this period would be people like Gabriel Okara, Dennis Osadebay, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark and poets like Christopher Okigbo.

In many ways, Christopher Okigbo was the most modernist thinking, or the most modernist in his style, and has defined actually, I think to a large extent, the kind of trend of Nigerian poetry till today. Unfortunately, we lost Chris during the Nigerian Biafran civil war and that has raised all sorts of questions about the artist's responsibility to society and so forth. But, he has this beautiful poem from the collection called Come Thunder, and the poem is called Come Thunder. And if you listen to it, you can hear almost that Yeatsian call. You can hear, it will almost sound... and this is a beautiful thing. It's written in the early sixties and it sort of pre-announces a Nigerian Biafran civil war. But it would work now, it would work in the context of, when after 9/11, I read this poem with a group of poets and it seemed so immediate. Come Thunder, by Christopher Okigbo.

Now that the triumphant march has entered the last street corners,

Remember, O dancers, the thunder among the clouds…

Now that the laughter, broken in two, hangs tremulous between the teeth,

Remember, O Dancers, the lightning beyond the earth…

The smell of blood already floats in the lavender-mist of the afternoon.

The death sentence lies in ambush along the corridors of power;

And a great fearful thing already tugs at the cables of the open air,

A nebula immense and immeasurable, a night of deep waters —

An iron dream unnamed and unprintable, a path of stone.

The drowsy heads of the pods in barren farmlands witness it,

The homesteads abandoned in this century’s brush fire witness it:

The myriad eyes of deserted corn cobs in burning barns witness it:

Magic birds with the miracle of lightning flash on their feathers…

The arrows of God tremble at the gates of light,

The drums of curfew pander to a dance of death;

And the secret thing in its heaving

Threatens with iron mask

The last lighted torch of the century.

And so, you sort of see this very, sort of he's echoing that modernist moment in Europe similar at this time.

Then I suppose we would look at things like the post-Civil War movement, because, you know, the civil war in Nigeria really affected a lot of things. Poetry tends to be a little briefer now. It's also marred by military dictatorships. And so I would say in 1970 to 79, and this would mark poets like Femi Osofisan, Wole Soyinka, the Igbo poet Paul (UNKNOWN), Chinua Achebe starts to write poetry at this time, Niyi Osundare, (UNKNOWN), Tanure Ojaide, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Michael Echeruo and J.P. Clark again, kind of, you see he tends to, some poets roll over generations. And there's a very short poem by J.P. Clark about a city called Ibadan. And Ibadan is unique in Yoruba culture because it's the most modern city. It's actually a city that is not owned by anyone and it's formed during the 19th century Oyo wars. And so post the Civil War, it seemed like a perfect poem. And so what he does is, he tries to create an elegy and a praise at the same time. J.P. Clark, Ibadan.

Ibadan

running splash of rust

and gold-flung and scattered

among seven hills like broken

china in the sun.

And so, again, you sort of see there seems to be a steady progression in the way things are working. And I wanna go quickly through to another generation, 1980 to 2002, and I call this the silenced generation, not because they were silent, but it seemed to be a moment in which no one seemed to be paying attention to a generation of amazing writers, fiction and poetry wise. This is a time when Nigeria in Nsukka, which was a big, important, and still is, university town. We have the Anthill, which is a small cafe that seemed to have developed slam poetry way before slam became big in the US, and everyone performed there. And this group was silenced because of the lack of critical attention and publicity within Nigeria and therefore outside of Nigeria, that seemed to make them invisible. You'd find poets, like Esiaba, the late Esiaba Irobi, who was incredible. In fact, he was also a playwright, and he has this opening to one of his plays called I can't remember now, and I think it's something called the hang, I think it's called the hangman.

But it's a short poetic sequence that he choreographs to martial arts. And it's one of the most beautiful things you can see and hear. There's people like Patrick (UNKNOWN). There's Olu Oguibe. There's Obi Nwakanma who actually is still writing and lives in the US right now. You find Uche Nduka, who's also still writing. And, Uche breaks away... and I think it's sad, because that silence makes the work of people like Uche invisible, who really begins, I would say, Uche is one of the first language poets from Nigeria. Crazy, beautiful work. There's Ogaga Ifowodo, there's Sylvester Ogbechie, Victor Okigbo, Christopher's nephew. There's Ama Ede, Ben Okri starts to write poetry at this point. And then Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Tanure Ojaide. And there's also Remi Raji. And so I want to read a very short poem by Remi about Lagos. It's called In Memoriam: Lagos, Remi Raji.

Suppose the river appears to you

In the shape of taps, or that the sun is awake

All day in the rays of unquenchable lights.

Suppose your streets leap with magic

The color of tar and hexagon marble

The calculus of the spider’s web,

A delta of trains and trams.

Suppose your lagoon and lakes wear

The whiteness of love boats

Or by the beach you can kiss

The mermaid without the fear of darkness,

And when you have danced day to lameness

Suppose you can choose your way home

In the predictability of the hour,

Still unfurled to the purple smell of night,

And suppose you’re not proscribed to many dead ends of the road

Suppose you are what you are not, dioxide virgin of phosphates.

And so, again, you can clearly see Okigbo's hands in here. But again, more and more you're starting to see a sort of very definitive lyric emerging, which is interesting, 'cause often one hears African poetry and things swing into clarity, these sort of quiet moments also happen. The Breakthrough Generation, 2002 to 2008, this is the generation that really begins to reinscribe Nigerian poetry both within and outside the country. Remi Raji is part of that, Obi Nwakanma, Uche Nduka, Ogaga Ifowodo, Dike Okoro, Uduma Kalu, Chukwuma Azuonye, Toyin Adewale, Ike Okonta, and if you notice there seems to be a lack of women on this list.

And that's largely not because the poetry hasn't been written, but in a very patriarchal system, women often get elided. So, I want to read from this, this kind of generation, a poem by an amazing female Nigerian poet. Her name is Lola Shoneyin, and this poem is called Open.

She is a vagrant poem,

a cautionary tale,

an old story,

an open book.

Her belly opens

and pages fly from it.

Words fall to feet,

letters flood the floor,

questions mark her steps.

Like Sylvia, she straddles,

and stumbles.

Who will put her back

together again‌

What will bind her

and bring her to a close‌

And again, and just to throw this out, because it may come up in the conversation later. You notice that, always, Nigerian poets and African poets, are constantly in dialogue with Western poets. Even though the Western poets, it seems, are completely unaware of this other tradition on this side. So, Sylvia Plath comes up, Yeats is coming up. All of these conversations that I think are absolutely fascinating. And I think the next poem I read will really sort of confirm this dialogue that is happening in the rest of the world.

That doesn't happen so much here. So, I wanna just go quickly to the what I call the future. The future is like what's going on right now and continues to grow. You find poets like Nnorom Azuonye, Abayomi Animashaun, Tolu Ogunlesi, Jumoke Verissimo. I mean, there are so many, I'm just trying to give examples. So I'm gonna read a poem by, this is the last of this sequence, and then we can stop here and then we can just launch into conversation, right? So, this poem is by Tolu Ogunlesi. What's really interesting is, it's published in the American journal called Boxcar Poetry Review, which is run by a young guy in California who's also a poet, Neil. And Neil is biracial. He's from Saskatchewan, lives in California, is a Mormon, has spent a lot of his life abroad. And so, again, you know, it's sort of the, America is a little bit more fractured than we like to think it is. But this poem is beautiful. It's called, On Reading 'A Wedding in Hell' by Charles Simic, by Tolu Ogunlesi.

I'm sitting down to consider

God doesn't exist.

He is my one and only

unanswered question, if you ignore

wars, death and UFOs. and girls.

Dear heavenly justice, did you

come in on the big bang bus;

are you leaving with it? or did you

really drive that double-decker

layered into above-firmament

and below-firmament?

Simic arrives dripping a trail of black

blasphemous ink. I close my eyes

my ears. he is a biased man.

I am not. Dear Charles,

your talent is proof

that the zookeeper exists.

and the angels

that your mind refuses to let

go of. and the love of the lovers

who crowd your poetry, and the sun

and birds and pigs, and the hell

where weddings sometimes take place.

the hell is the proof of heaven.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
That's beautiful.

CHRIS ABANI:
Yeah.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
So enter Chris Abani. You, you come into this tradition in various ways. You borrow from it, you work alongside it, you break from it. You also embody both that historical root and several spaces in diaspora, both in the UK and in the United States. I wonder if you can speak a little bit about how the tradition you've just really beautifully illuminated feeds into your own aesthetic and how that drives your work, where perhaps we could argue your roots are there, but your branches are flowering in various other spaces as well.

CHRIS ABANI:
Well, I mean, it's a beautiful and tough question. So, as I was, when I was going through the list, you start to realize that Nigerian literature or African poets... I'm gonna go as far as to say African, only because there are no Africans, but then it just allows us to kind of aggregate a continental moment. But we resist generational placement. So, you find someone like Wole Soyinka whose writing starts way in the fifties and you still find him writing today and not, not recreating the old material, but engaging with the new generation. So, that's almost how I see myself, as a sort of moving forward through the stream of poetry, going backwards and forwards. I grew up in small Igbo towns, speaking Igbo, and Igbo, like a lot of Nigerian languages, is as an inferential language, you know, it's not a language of transaction. Transactions occur, but the philosophical import, the philosophical drive, the moment to consider every moment as something significant is there. And that's largely because I think African religions, particularly Ifa and traditional Igbo religions, can contend with the notion of randomness in the universe.

But rather than seeing randomness as evil or necessary, they believe it to be a necessary part of growth and a significant thing. And so, I guess that's really why you find proverbs. And so I was, you know, I had, I would do something wrong, or I would, as a young person, I'd ask an inappropriate question when my elders were talking and my father would look at me and say something like, although the Igbo say, you know, too, the person who ask questions never gets lost, still, it is only a foolish man who would wake a leopard to ask the way to the market. And you're like, What? I don't understand. And then you'd be left to figure out what you're being told, in a way. And so already, the relationship to spoken, to written language is one where every line has multiple layers of meanings and is already cross referencing traditions and stories, flora and fauna. And so when I grew up speaking with an English mother, so I had all of that English tradition with a Nigerian father who was educated in Oxford.

So, I guess even when I approached English, I approached English with the same malleability of mind that Igbo would have. And so, then and you notice this with a lot of poets from where I come from, English is plastic, it's elastic, it can be reshaped, it can be re-envisioned. Then if you add to that this notion that everything is spiritual, everything has religious connotation, not in so much a notion of a faith driven, but the idea that there is always awe and wonder, there's always a thing that's inexplicable. And so, the thing that is inexplicable is never denied, but rather poetically contained. And so growing up, I went to seminary to be a priest. So then, you have all the influence of Latin Mass, you have all the influence of the Psalms. And, you know, for a long time when I was growing up, everyone was convinced Bob Marley was from Nigeria. So then, you find reggae plays a huge part in it, because here's someone giving voice to the voiceless and, but at the same time, it's sort of like you have a musician like Fela Kuti in the seventies, who everyone loves because of the social relevance.

But like Elvis and the parents of the Americans and Elvis' generation who saw Elvis as this terrible influence, our parents thought Fela was a terrible influence. And yet my dad loved, he loved Bob Marley, in a strange way, because my dad's favorite musician was Jim Reeves. And so, you sit in my dad's car and the song like, you know, Don't Let Me Cross Over Loves, you know, this veiled Christian country lyrics are going on, and then suddenly it's like, lively up yourself. So all of this has a tremendous influence on my thinking and my writing and reading the Russians as a young man, reading comic books. So, and then realizing that this orality is not a poetry that no longer exists, it's a continuation down to... If you go to Lagos, the bus conductors, so buses don't work in the same way they do here, there's a bus stop, but buses aren't run by the city, they're owned by individuals. And so everyone's calling passengers. So, even that becomes... so if you pulled up in a central terminus like Oshodi, you would hear people going, Iya Gbaja street, Iyana Gbaja blackba don't enter, don't enter.

So even the calling of passengers becomes this call and response. And so you would hear the conductors going yaba yaba yaba and the passengers going blackba blackba blackba. And so the whole living, the whole moment of it is art. And so, all of that begins to impact the way I write. But because it is constantly in motion, when you live in Nigeria or Nigeria all the time or you completely accept this, it becomes something that is inflexible. So then, I start to break away from that. I start to find the places for, you know, unorthodox voices, the moments in which you can mix Beethoven with Bob Marley. And so my work is always looking for a different thing. But always, you will find, is holding on to this incantatory quality. Yeah.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
And how are you finding the diaspora has influenced this? You know, you you live and write and teach in the United States at present. You're very well aware of American poetic traditions. How does that enter into this space? And in a world where that you've clearly articulated sampling and borrowing and exchange and engagement with various traditions is quite natural and common. What, what has the diaspora brought to your work in that way?

CHRIS ABANI:
It's interesting because, when we think about the ways in which even music develops in West Africa, you know, you have the notion that a group of people are forcibly taken to another country, so let's call it slavery. And then a music emerges from Malinka styles, that becomes that we can call it the blues. This travels back with African American sailors to the ports of Ghana where young men pick up these guitar chords. And so you find in somewhere like Ghana, highlife emerges. And so constantly, it would seem to me, that the dialogue has already existed between Africa and the diaspora, particularly this notion of a black diaspora. Almost all of the the movements towards independence in West Africa emerge from leaders who are often educated in black American universities, that Garvey is really the guiding figure, so that the emergence of sort of freedom movements in the Caribbean spilling into black American movements, the civil rights movement, begins to create the foundations for all of that.

So I feel like there's always been this conversation. And so when I arrived here, I immediately found that conversation and immediately felt completely at home. And also even within what one would normally think of as non-African traditions, you can't have all, you can't... I mean, if you think about Robert Hayden, who's writing at the same roughly, you know, you would almost call him a peer of Langston Hughes, although not the same age but... so there are two different styles. You know, one is really calling up the blues in this way and this other, you know, Hayden is really writing almost like Wallace Stevens is writing. And so, I suddenly realize that for true African poets, and by use of the word African I mean by descent, by inheritance, by vibration. There's always been this dialogue, and it's easy to find that happening in Eastern European poets who've migrated here. So, I guess for me, what happens is I, I started to realize how much of the American lyric can move outside of its limitations of being sort of this individual poet's view of the world and become this almost, this an epic that is built of small steps.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
Your work has never shied away from difficult subject matter. And...

CHRIS ABANI:
My work? I write about roses.

MATTHEW SHENODA:

(LAUGHS)
But I wonder if, I mean, in all of what you're articulating right now, there's clearly a sense of awe, as you've talked about, of wonder, of a spiritual influence in the work, a struggle towards what we might loosely call some sort of beauty, which resonates absolutely in all of your work, but in that, you never shy away from the implication of all that is negative in humanity, the implication of war, the implication of the body and all of the myriad forms that has been abused. And I wonder if you can speak a little bit about that openness and willingness to kind of head straight for the heart and the truth of a matter, no matter how ugly it might be. And then your really stunning ability to find something beautiful in that.

CHRIS ABANI:
Well, I guess in many ways I'm unabashedly religious, and I don't mean this in the limited ways we think of religion. But really religion is a language that defines something that is essentially human about us. So in that way, I would say Einstein is deeply religious, Carl Sagan was deeply religious, every biophysicist I meet is deeply religious. It doesn't really matter what canon you're working with. It's this notion of awe, this constant idea of the discovery of the fact that even within what seems like a limitation there's always a possibility. I grew up in a very Catholic home, deeply Catholic home. But at the same time, with grandfathers who were deeply involved in traditional religions. And, you know, the beautiful thing about Catholicism in Africa is it did not in any ways try to erase traditional religions. It figured the best way to do is to try and get along and pretend those things weren't happening. So, I think a lot of my relationship to this notion of difficulty is actually quite biblical.

Because if you read the Bible, it's quite an informative text. If you were to look at Samuel alone and look at the trials of King David or Job or even if you were to look at those moments of Jesus's life, you know, some really interesting moments like the morning in Gethsemane where, as one of my students put it, when I was trying to describe this moment, and they said, so you're saying Jesus just punked out. (LAUGHS) What you start to find is the constant negotiation between the idea of what is material and what is immaterial. And that no matter how difficult and tortured and gross, the material remains, that which is truly human transcends all of that. And so that's really what the struggle is always in my work, is to find this moment. And I think, you know, you probably have had this conversation with Kwame, too, and I know you and I have, over reggae, where in a three minute pop song, you have lament, you have sorrow, you have the love song, you have the resistance. And this is what I, so this is what I love about it.

The idea that, that an imagination can contain an acceptance of difficulty, that is not submission, but rather contains also within it resistance. But that articulation of those two contradictions becomes, can only generate poetic voice or a poetic sensibility, because that's all that can hold in. And I mean, this is visible in every Psalm, for instance. But you know, it's also in Igbo culture there's an old proverb that says, (SPEAKS IN IGBO), a child can never escape their own shadow. And so the notion is that the world is always a reflection of these two struggles. So, Igbo thinking accepts it. So growing up in a very traditional Nigerian middle class setting and being both Catholic and going to the seminary and being kicked out for heresy. But also growing up with this traditional thinking, you realize that, for most Africans and I would suggest that if you went all the way from ancient Egypt to now, the belief is that this is how the world is articulated, there is this and that, not this or that.

And so Western thinking is this or that, it cannot accept two things. There's a victim and an oppressor. In Africa, the victims are kind of oppressors, and the oppressors are kind of victims. So, this idea that never takes away personal responsibility, which means that it never takes away hope. And this is really vital, because this is, I think, what gets lost when people articulate singular worldviews, is that the erasure of difficulty is what they think is the reinforcement of hope. But it's actually the containment of that difficulty, within and rediscovering transubstantiation into light, that is really what hope is.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
This reminds me of the African-American theoretician bell hooks, who once argued that those of us who love justice refuse simplistic binaries.

CHRIS ABANI:
There you go.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
And I think in that struggle to find, however we define a sense of justice, we have to refuse binaries, which means something that you said I think that's really important is an embrace of contradictions. And I have found both through my own life and just the world around me, diaspora is the ultimate contradiction.

CHRIS ABANI:
That's right.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
And I'm curious as to how you see that, playing in your work. I think, you know, what you're talking about, I think, butts up against perhaps, not entirely, but some mainstream notions in American literature, that really have not been open to the embrace of contradiction. This idea of selling out, this idea of not being able to engage two things that don't seem to work together, but finding a way to make them work together. And in that process, one forces a very singular narrative that I think in the world of poetry causes the work to suffer. It's that complexity, that embrace of contradiction, that for me anyways, makes certain aesthetics far more interesting than others. And I wonder if you can talk about that specifically and how you've navigated that through your own aesthetic leanings, which can be at times referred to as, quote, experimental and at times not seen as traditional. I don't think anyone reads your work in a particularly traditional way, but as someone who is pushing those boundaries in various ways, and using an artistic aesthetic to explore that space.

CHRIS ABANI:
Yeah. I love all these easy questions man, I have to say. (LAUGHS) So, Jimmy Baldwin. Yeah. James Baldwin is a writer, I wish I could have been. So, Baldwin talks about the idea of dialogue in all forms as a notion of love and, he says, not sentimental love, although that is certainly a part of it. He says it's the recognition that it involves giving up parts of each other to each other. And so what that was really saying is that whether we welcome a particular viewpoint or not, we have to have given up something to allow that viewpoint to exist in us long enough for us to decide we don't want it. And this is a beautiful way to think of the world. And this is something I find completely lacking in very modern and I think, contemporary American thinking. And I don't mean this, I mean, in terms of academic thinking and in terms of all academies in a sense, because academies get built around the notions of power. And so, this leads to ridiculous ideas, like all the language poets over here and the confessional poets over here, and instead of saying, wow isn't it incredible that a language poet is trying to break through to something again, which Baldwin is talking about, a moment of complete awe, by disassembling the tools by which we would blasély or sentimentally reach to that thing.

And then the lyric poet is trying to do the same thing within the tools that we might think would lead to sentimentality. So both of these resistances become important. So then, I often find I don't understand what the fight between certain schools becomes about. And so what that does is that it sort of, rather than the impetus being the question, the impetus becomes the answer. So, you know, when I was growing up after the civil war in Nigeria, we had lost a lot of young Biafrans. And so a lot of my teachers were imports from India, from Pakistan, and I've talked in the past about the power of some of those teachers. But, you know, I remember always again, I had a Pakistani teacher in primary school, Mr. Khalid, who was a deeply Muslim thinker, but believed in the notions of how Judaic questioning worked. And so I remember in class, you know, I was one of those really annoying kids that sat in front. So I always had my hand up. Yes, sir, sir, pick me, sir. And I was had the answer. And so finally, one day he called me aside and he said, you give good answers, don't you?

And I said, yes, sir. And I said, but people don't like me 'cause of that. And he said, no, I don't know whether you should worry about that. I think what you should try to do is ask yourself if you can ask good questions. And this again, this sort of this is really what is the impetus of all art, is to ask the good question. And I think that poetry is about, to a large extent, not about what's articulated, but the impossibility of articulation, so that the ink on the white space is really this idea that somewhere between what emerges and what cannot emerge is a moment of profundity than the ineffable happens in. But if that is no longer the quest, then it simply becomes a mechanistic exercise in the way in which you find people writing what they think are haikus that are simply three line poems with a certain syllabic count. Because the spirit of the haiku is in the turn, and the turn is in the change of perception, which can only lead from a deep. So, I think that this is really what we're struggling with all the time, that we're no longer driving for something deeper, that we're either just privileging our immediate experience, or privileging voices that have not traditionally been privileged, or arguing about who should be privileged.

Whereas the thing that really makes art art, is largely missing in this moment. And so that's what I always go for. And therefore, it's impossible to use one form. It is impossible to refuse anything. But it's also, I think, that we live so ahistorically that we think of this idea what is revolutionary as passé. You have to imagine how insane it might have been for a man, jumped up man, who nobody knew, whose dad was a carpenter to walk around in a Roman time yelling, I'm the son of God, just like the homeless guy on the corner here in Chicago saying, you know, I'm Jesus, and everybody laughing and walking by. Well, that's not different from the other dude. It's just that after 2000 years, it's become a safe religion. And so I'm very wary of safety and these ideas of what's safe, and begin to always look at what happens if you find yourself always in this moment, in this moment where all of those things that we have considered safe can be unsafe. And so, it's always an implication of myself, of my idea, of my own sense of ease in the world, of my own smugness ,to a certain extent, about what I think I know.

And even my realizations that I think of what is good and what is not good are also dangerous, because again, so it's always, you know, struggling against singularity. But the difficulty of that always, of course, is that you can't be located. So, your body is always problematic because people want to locate your body somewhere so they can locate your aesthetic somewhere rather than locating your aesthetic in this real way, which is nomadic. There's an encyclopedia of black writers that came out a while ago, and I'm listed in the black British section, the African section and the African-American section, because apparently there's no one place that my work would go to. And I would actually argue that there are so many writers like that. And so for me, really always what's interesting is the work I'm making, not how it's knowing the tradition you come from, but always asking yourself, you know, we're talking about that proverb earlier on about the leopard kissing... The original proverb is essentially the Igbo saying, a person who asks questions never gets lost, which is, again, almost like the, we're talking about this rabbinic, or how do you say, the rabbinical thrust was looking for the better question, right?

But then somebody quite possibly not that long ago, maybe even a hundred years ago, sitting around having some palm wine and someone challenges him and he tags on this new part of this proverb. So, in this way, you find that African thinking, traditional African thinking is always expanding. And you also have to understand that traditional religions have no empirical, empirical thrust, sorry, imperialistic thrust. They're not dominating. They're not seeking for worshippers. They just exist. And so even when you take Christianity and break it down deeply in early context in Africa, it becomes an African religion, which is why the Coptic tradition and Ethiopian church are deeply African in their thinking and vary widely from a lot of the Rome, sort of the more Catholic and other kinds of ways of Christian thinking, as opposed to sort of the more modernist, as we have evangelical drives in West Africa. So, I think that the most difficult problem we face in America is this erasure of historical context, because you find Russian poets doing the same.

I was just listening the other night to this amazing singing that comes sort of out of Georgia and Slovenia in languages that are almost extinct in those areas. And I was listening to this incantation, so I said to my friend, what does this mean? He said, oh, he's singing about, what you must do is cut the head off your enemy and all that sort of stuff. So, that contention with difficulty has always existed within this language of beauty, all over the world. And I think that what we need to do in the contemporary American moment is reach beyond the border of the American thinking, not gesture really, but really deeply to find our reconnection to all those places.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
Can you share a poem?

CHRIS ABANI:
So, this poem is from the book Sanctificum, which are movements. So, this is from a movement called Om. And this is poem number five.

Somewhere a man speaks

in the dark, voice lost to rain.

I know this hunger, this need

to make patterns, to build meaning

from detritus; also the light

and the wood floor bare but for the lone slipper

tossed carelessly to one side. I admit the lies I've told.

Look, nothing has been true since that picture of hell on the living room wall lost its terror.

I say I want a strong woman, but unlike Neto

I cannot have the woman and the fish.

The war followed.

Children are losing their souls to the heat.

Which is to say, poor American soldiers.

Which is to say poor African soldiers.

Which is to say poor Palestinian soldiers.

Which is to say poor Israeli soldiers.

The rich have found a way to charge theirs to American Express.

And I say, ask this, what is the relationship of desire to memory?

Here is a boy in the airport cafe, hair cropped from service.

And he closes his eyes to take a sip of coffee.

And he smiles as the dark washes the desert away.

This is the voice of the Lord. Amen.

MATTHEW SHENODA:
Chris Abani, thank you.

CHRIS ABANI:
Thank you, Matthew.

ED HERMAN:
That was Chris Abani reading poem number five and speaking with Matthew Shenoda. This program was recorded at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on March 4th, 2013, as part of International Poets in Conversation, and was sponsored by the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute's, Poets in the World series. The poem read by Chris Abani comes from his most recent collection, Sanctificum, and is published by Copper Canyon Press. Other books by Chris Abani include There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me the Sun, Hands Washing Water, and Dog Woman. Abani has also published five books of prose. Matthew Shenoda's first collection of poems, Somewhere Else, was published in 2005 and was named a debut book of the Year by Poets and Writers magazine. His most recent book is, Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone. You can learn more about Matthew Shenoda and Chris Abani and read some of their work by visiting poetryfoundation.org, where you'll also find articles by and about poets, an online archive of more than 10,000 poems, the Harriet Blog about poetry, the complete back issues of Poetry Magazine and other audio programs to download.

I'm Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to Poetry Lectures from PoetryFoundation.org.