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Songs From Four Poets
A QUARTET of poets formed a starry line-up recently, celebrating their African connections in a reading event in London.
Mapanje's second collection of poetry was banned in his native Malawi, where he was imprisoned by dictator Hastings Banda's government for nearly four years. He now lives in exile in New York, and began his reading with a poem from 1969, The New Platform Dances. Back then, the poet and his contemporaries had discovered that "the role of the writer is like that of a rainmaker who has failed to bring down rain." Said Mapanje, "When This Carnival Finally Closes was "the one apparently the authorities didn't like, which, I don't know why." Written in his student days in London, the poem was a reaction to a British television newsflash showing how Liberia's Samuel Doe had government Ministers lined up and shot. "I was shocked by what Africa was doing to itself," said Mapanje. The poet's birthplace features in another poem, Kadango Village, Even Milimbo Lagoon Is Dry - about famine in Malawi; something the government did not want mentioned. Also read, were: Scrubbing The Furious Walls Of Mikuyu Prison, based on Mapanje's time in jail; and Smiller's Bar Revisited, May 1983 - lamenting the deaths of four Malawian cabinet Ministers. "They were accidentalised, made into an accident," Mapanje explained. Mapanje's self deprecating sense of humour came through in Easter Apologies For Babble Dreams, which he called "one of those poems that one writes to apologise to one's wife for having done everything wrong." He concluded an unfinished poem, Altar Boy at 60, written for his recent birthday. To the audience's amusement, altar boy discovers that "he'd done virtually nothing/ to write home about." Born in London to Nigerians and raised by white foster parents, Patience Agbabi has published two volumes of poetry: R.A.W and Transformatrix. Her Nigerian father was in the South Bank audience for her Africa Remix performance. Dressed in a pink trouser-suit and heavily pregnant, Agbabi lived up to her reputation as a dynamic performer, moving fluidly around the stage, delivering her lines from memory and working with several microphones. She opened with two tribute poems: one, Off The Shelf was written for Chinua Achebe; the other was for the absent Kwame Dawes, who helped knock Transformatrix into shape, covering the first draft in red ink. Getting into her stride, Agbabi performed the autobiographical UFO Woman, covering her childhood up to the age of 10, when she visited Nigeria for the first time. She had felt a bit alien as a black child in Sussex, England, and felt no less alien - as a British child in the markets of Lagos. Not The Wife of Bath - the poet's 'remix' of Chaucer - livened things up. Apologising in advance for her "not good enough" Nigerian accent, she delivered the hilarious poem in the voice of a Nigerian woman who has had five husbands. When one of them turned wife batterer because she burnt his Playboy magazine, "I beat him till he begged for his ancestors." Skins and Seeing Red followed, as well as The Excoriation - one of Agbabi's 'hair poems'. She explained: "As black women, we can't help but think about hair." And, "I'm determined to keep writing hair poems until..." Then, looking down at her bulging belly, she revealed that this would be her last performance in a long while, "because I am about to..." The audience understood, and applauded. John Agard came onstage and spoke of why a poet from the Caribbean necessarily completes the Africa Remix. "Africa is very much a part of the Caribbean psyche," he declared, citing the folklore character, Anansi, as one of the many bridges between the two worlds. Agard is a leading poet of the West Indian bardic composition, and his works fuses jazz, theatre and chant, delivered in a calypso styled language. In an exhilarating performance, Agard launched into his confrontation politics with Anti Nansi Sound System: "Because I come from the Caribbean/ Some people in England think that/ I am an expert on Palm tree!" he squealed. "Palm tree history is a long, long story!" he continued, in a very funny ridiculing of Western stereotypical expectations of black people. A master of voices with a keen eye on the history of the races, Agard got serious with John Edmund Stone. He discovered only last year, that Charles Darwin was taught taxidermy while studying medicine in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Stone, a freed African slave. Darwin became known for his theory of evolution, but Stone dropped into the black hole of history. And so Agard paid a tribute to the unacknowledged, performing the poem in Stone's voice. Another one followed in the voice of John Milton, composer of the hymn Amazing Grace - and master of a slave ship. Agard arrived at one of his favourite subjects - the Devil. Concerned about the demonisation of pagan gods and goddesses in Western thought and religion, the poet has a sympathy for the devil, "who's had a very bad press." Quoting an old Irish proverb: "God is good, and the Devil isn't bad either," he went on to render a series of poems, From The Devil's Pulpit. The collection represents the Devil's take on the world. Bawdy and witty, the poetic voice says in Question Time With The Devil: "Blessed are the meek/ If someone smacks your left buttock/ Turn the other cheek." Things went into free-fall and the atmosphere became charged, as though the poet had summoned 'the bridge builder' onto the stage. In a stunning performance, Agard seemed to increase in stature. Arms raised like Moses about to part the Red Sea, he declared repeatedly - as the devil might have done: "Bridge builder, I am!" Jackie Kay's reading allowed the Purcell Room to cool off. Born and raised in Scotland by white parents, she met her Nigerian father - a man of the cloth - only two years ago. That meeting has inspired a new collection of poetry, Life Mask. The poet went to Nigeria, hoping to meet her father's other children "but since I was his past sin", the family reunion never happened. After a prayer session in a hotel lounge, Kay's father told her: "I am a healer"; she thought: "Well, heal me" - hinting perhaps, at the emotional cost of their unusual relationship. A waitress nearby heard the father and took her chance, telling him she was barren. According to the poet, her father "prayed (for the waitress) and shook her head, told her she'd have a baby by December. 'Call him Jacob'." This incident is alluded to in two new poems, Medicine Man and Fertility Mask. The father is a man of masks for whom the daughter has to wear masks too. Amazingly, Jackie Kay does not seem bitter at the inherent hypocrisy. What comes across is the generous spirit of a poet who insists on seeing her father as a witty, larger than life, almost magical figure. "If you go to Nigeria, you will find more bizarre church groups than anywhere else," she told the audience. On the first meeting: "My dad said, 'Before I can proceed with this meeting, I have to pray for you.' That was fine, but it went on for two and half hours! At the end, I had a migraine." Kay's father told her about his young wife: "God in His wisdom has provided me with someone of my sex drive." She, in turn, told him about her lesbianism. "Oh, okay, okay; which one of you is a man?" came his response. His attire inspired the poem, A White African Dress. On return to Britain, Kay showed a photograph of him in his majestic Agbada to her white adoptive mother who exclaimed sweetly: "Jesus Christ, where does he get all the regalia?!" Kay smiled through every recollection, every poem, lacing every bit of it with humour, so that the audience found itself laughing too, despite the heavier issues involved. It was clear the warm-hearted poet had turned her meeting with the unnamed father into a celebration.
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