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Love Poems
Helon Habila
Helon Habila is one of the most exciting writers from Africa. He won
the 2001 Caine Prize for African Writing for "Love Poems" and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers
Prize for Best First Book (Africa Region) for Waiting for an Angel (2003). His second
novel, Measuring Time will be published in 2006. He is a fellow of Africana Global Studies at Bard College,
New York, USA.
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In the middle of his
second year in prison, Lomba got access to pencil and paper and he started a diary. It was
not easy. He had to write in secret, mostly in the early mornings when the night warders,
tired of peeping through the door bars, waited impatiently for the morning shift. Most of
the entries he simply headed with the days of the week; the exact dates, when he used them,
were often incorrect. The first entry was in July 1997, a Friday.
Friday, July 1997
Today I begin a diary, to say all the things I want to say,
to myself, because here in prison there is no one to listen. I express myself. It stops me
from standing in the centre of this narrow cell and screaming at the top of my voice. It stops
me from jumping up suddenly and bashing my head repeatedly against the wall. Prison chains not
so much of your hands and feet as it does your voice.
I express myself. I let my mind soar above these walls to bring
back distant, exotic bricks with which I seek to build a more endurable cell within cell.
Prison. Misprison. Dis. Un. Prisoner. See? I write of my state in words of derision, aiming
thereby to reduce the weight of these walls on my shoulders, to rediscover my nullified
individuality. Here in prison loss of self is often expressed as anger. Anger is the baffled
prisoner's attempt to re-crystallize his slowly dissolving self. The anger creeps up on you,
like twilight edging out the day. It builds in you silently until one day it explodes in
violence, surprising you.
I saw it happen in my first month in prison. A prisoner, without
provocation, had attacked an unwary warder at the toilets. The prisoner had come out of a
bath-stall and there was the warder before him, monitoring the morning ablutions. Suddenly
the prisoner leaped upon him, pulling him by the neck to the ground, grinding him into the
black, slimy water that ran in the gutter from the toilets. He pummelled the surprised face
repeatedly until other warders came and dragged him away. They beat him to a pulp before
throwing him into solitary.
Sometimes the anger leaves you as suddenly as it appeared;
then you enter a state of tranquil acceptance. You realize the absolute puerility of your
anger: it was nothing but acid, cancer,
eating away your bowels in the dark. You accept the inescapability of your fate; and with that,
you learn the craft of cunning. You learn ways of surviving--surviving the mindless banality of
the walls around you, the incessant harassment from the warders; you learn to hide money in
your anus, to hold a cigarette inside your mouth without wetting it. And each day survived is
a victory against the jailer, a blow struck for freedom.
My anger lasted a whole year. I remember the exact day it left
me. It was a Saturday, the day after
| "The poems were mostly love poems;
fugitive lines from poets he had read in school: Dunne, Shakespeare, Graves, Eliot,
etc. Some were his original compositions rewritten from memory; but a lot were
fresh creations--tortured sentimental effusions to women he had known and
admired, and perhaps loved." |
a failed escape attempt by two convicted murderers. The
warders were more than usually brutal that day; the inmates were on tenterhooks, not knowing
from where the next blow would come. We were lined up in rows in our cell, waiting for hours
to be addressed by the prison superintendent. When he came his scowl was hard as rock, his eyes
were red and singeing, like fire. He paced up and down before us, systematically flagellating
us with his harsh staccato sentences. We listened, our heads bowed, our hearts quaking.
When he left, an inmate, just back from a week in solitary, broke
down and began to weep. His hands shook, as if with a life of their own. 'What's going to happen
next?' he wailed, going from person to person, looking into each face, not waiting for an
answer. 'We'll be punished. If I go back there I'll die. I can't. I can't.' Now he was standing
before me, a skinny mass of eczema inflammations, and ringworm, and snot. He couldn't be more
than twenty, I thought; what did he do to end up in this dungeon? Then, without thinking, I
reached out and patted his shoulder. I even smiled. With a confidence I did not feel I said
kindly, 'No one will take you back.' He collapsed into my arms, soaking my shirt with snot and
tears and saliva. 'Everything will be all right,' I repeated over and over. That was the day
the anger left me.
* * *
In the over two months
that he wrote before he was discovered and his diary seized, Lomba managed to put in quite a
large number of entries. Most of them were poems, and letters to various persons from his by
now hazy, preprison life--letters he can't have meant to send. There were also long soliloquies
and desultory interior monologues.
The poems were mostly love poems; fugitive lines from poets
he had read in school: Dunne, Shakespeare, Graves, Eliot, etc. Some were his original
compositions rewritten from memory; but a lot were fresh creations--tortured sentimental
effusions to women he had known and admired, and perhaps loved. Of course they might have
been imaginary beings, fabricated in the smithy of his prison-fevered mind. One of the poems
reads like a prayer to a much doubted, but fervently hoped for God:
Lord, I've had days black as pitch
And nights crimson as blood,
But they have passed over me, like water.
Let this one also pass over me, lightly
Like a smooth rock rolling down the hill,
Down my back, my skin, like soothing water.
That, he wrote, was the prayer on his lips the day the cell door
opened without warning and the superintendent, flanked by two baton-carrying warders, entered.
Monday, September
I had waited for this; perversely anticipated it with each day
that passed, with each surreptitious sentence that I wrote. I knew it was me he came for when
he stood there, looking bigger than life, bigger than the low, narrow cell. The two dogs with
him licked their chops and growled. Their eyes roved hungrily over the petrified inmates caught
sitting, or standing, or crouching; laughing, frowning, scratching--like figures in a movie
still.
'Lomba, step forward!' his voice rang out suddenly. In the frozen
silence it sounded like glass breaking on concrete, but harsher, without the tinkling. I was on
my mattress on the floor, my back propped against the damp wall. I stoop up. I stepped
forward.
He turned the scowl on me. 'So, Lomba. You are.'
Yes, I am Lomba,' I said. My voice did not fail me. Then he
nodded, almost imperceptibly, to the two warders. They bounded forward eagerly, like game
hounds scenting a rabbit. One went to a tiny crevice low in the wall, almost hidden by my
mattress. He threw aside the mattress and poked two fingers into the triangular crack. He
came out with a thick roll of papers. He looked triumphant as he handed it to the
superintendent. Their informer had been exact. The other hound reached unerringly into a
tiny hole in the sagging, rain-patterned ceiling and brought out another tube of papers.
'Search. More!' the superintendent barked. He unrolled the tubes.
He appeared surprised at the number of sheets in his hands. I was. I didn't know I had written
so much. When they were through with the holes and crevices, the dogs turned their noses to my
personal effects. They picked up my mattress and shook and sniffed and poked. The ripped off
the tattered cloth on its back. There were no papers there. They took the pillow-cum-rucksack
(a jeans trouser-leg cut off at the mid-thigh and knotted at the ankle) and poured out the
contents on to the floor. Two threadbare shirts, one pair of trousers, one plastic comb, one
toothbrush, one half-used bar of soap, and a pencil.
This is the sum of my life, I thought. This is what I've finally
shrunk to; the detritus after the explosion: a comb, a toothbrush, soap, two shirts, one pair
of trousers and a pencil. They swooped on the pencil before it had finished rolling on the
floor, almost knocking heads in their haste.
'A pencil!' the superintendent said, shaking his head,
exaggerating his amazement. The prisoners were standing in a tight, silent arc. He walked the
length of the arc, displayed the papers and pencil, clucking his tongue. 'Papers. And pencil.
In prison. Can you believe that? In my prison!'
I was sandwiched between the two hounds, watching the drama in
silence. I felt removed from it all. Now the superintendent finally turned to me. He bent a
little at the waist, pushing his face into mine. I smelt his grating smell; I picked out the
white roots beneath his carefully dyed moustache.
'I will ask. Once. Who gave you. Papers?' He spoke like that in
jerky, truncated sentences.
I shook my head. I did my best to meet his red-hot glare. 'I
don't know.'
Some of the inmates gasped, shocked; they mistook my answer for
reckless intrepidity. They thought I was foolishly trying to protect my source. But in a few
other eyes I saw sympathy. They understood that I had really forgotten where the papers came
from.
'Hmm,' the superintendent growled. His eyes were on the papers
in his hands; he kept folding and unfolding them. I was surprised he had not pounced on me yet.
Maybe he was giving me a spell to reconsider my hopeless decision to protect whoever it was I
was protecting. The papers. They might have blown in through the door bars on the sentinel wind
that sometimes patrolled the prison yard in the evenings. Maybe a sympathetic warder, seeing my
yearning for self-expression emblazoned neon-like on my face, had secretly thrust the roll of
papers into my hands as he passed me in the yard. Maybe--and this seems more probable--I bought
them from another inmate (anything can be bought here in prison, from marijuana to a gun). But
I had forgotten. In prison, memory short-circuit is an ally to be cultivated at all costs.
I repeat. My question. Who gave you the papers?' he thundered
into my face, spraying me with spit.
I shook my head. 'I have forgotten.'
I did not see it, but he must have nodded to one of the hounds.
All I felt was the crushing blow on the back of my neck. I pitched forward, stunned by pain and
the unexpectedness of it. My face struck the door bars and I fell before the superintendent's
boots. I saw blood where my face had touched the floor. I waited. I stared, mesmerized, at the
reflection of my eyes in the high gloss of the boot's toecaps. One boot rose and landed on my
neck, grinding my face into the floor.
'So. You won't. Talk. You think you are. Tough,' he shouted. 'You
are. Wrong. Twenty years! That is how long I have been dealing with miserable bastards like you.
Let this be an example to all of you. Don't. Think you can deceive me. We have our sources of
information. You can't. This insect will be taken to solitary and he will be properly dealt
with. Until. He is willing to. Talk.'
I imagined his eyes rolling balefully round the tight, narrow
cell, branding each of the sixty inmates separately. The boot pressed down harder on my neck;
I felt a tooth bend at the root.
'Don't think because you are political. Detainees you are
untouchable. Wrong. You are all rats. Saboteurs. Anti-government rats. That is all. Rats.'
But the superintendent was too well versed in the ways of torture
to throw me into solitary that very day. I waited two days before they came and blindfolded me
and took me away to the solitary section. In the night. Forty-eight house. In the first
twenty-four hours I waited with my eyes fixed on the door, bracing myself whenever it opened;
but it was only the cooks bringing the meal, or the number-check warders come to count the
inmates for the night, or the slop-disposal team. In the second twenty-four hours I bowed my
head into my chest and refused to look up. I was tired. I refused to eat or speak or move. I
was rehearsing for solitary.
* * *
They came, at around ten
at night. The two hounds. Banging their batons on the door bars, shouting my name, cursing and
kicking at anyone in their path. I hastened to my feet before they reached me, my trouser-leg
rucksack clutched like a shield in my hands. The light of their torch on my face was like a blow.
'Lomba!'
'Come here! Move!'
Oya, out. Now!'
I moved, stepping high over the stirring bodies on the floor. The
light fell on my rucksack.
'What's that in your hand, eh? Where you think say you dey carry
am go? Bring am. Come here! Move!'
* * *
Outside. The cell door
clanked shut behind us. All the compounds were in darkness. Only security lights from poles
shone at the sentry posts. In the distance, the prison wall loomed huge and merciless, like a
mountain. Broken bottles. Barbed wire. Then they threw the blindfold over my head. My hands
instinctively started to rise, but they were held and forced behind me and cuffed.
'Follow me.'
One was before me, the other was behind, prodding me with
his baton. I followed the footsteps, stumbling. At first it was easy to say where we were. There
were eight compounds within the prison yard; ours was the only one reserved for political
detainees. There were four other Awaiting Trial men's compounds surrounding ours. Of
the three compounds for convicted criminals, one was for lifers and one, situated far away
from the other compounds, was for condemned criminals. Now we had passed the central
lawn where the warders conducted their morning parade. We turned left towards the convicted
prisoners' compounds, then right towards ... we turned right again, then straight ... I followed the
boots, now totally disoriented. I realized that the forced march had no purpose to it, or rather
its purpose was not to reach anywhere immediately. It was part of the torture. I walked. On and on.
I bumped into the front warder whenever he stopped abruptly.
'What? You no de see? Idiot!'
Sometimes I heard their voices exchanging pleasantries and
amused chuckles with other warders. We marched for over thirty minutes; my slippered feet
were chipped and bloody from hitting into stones. My arms locked behind me robbed me of
balance and often I fell down, then I'd be prodded and kicked. At some places--near the light
poles--I was able to see brief shimmers of light. At other places the darkness was thick as walls,
and eerie. I recalled the shuffling, chain-clanging steps we heard late at nights through our cell
window. Reluctant, sad steps. Hanging victims going to the hanging room; or their ghosts returning.
We'd lie in the dark, stricken by immobility as the shuffling grew distant and finally faded away.
Now we were on concrete, like a corridor. The steps in front halted.
I waited. I heard metal knock against metal, then the creaking of hinges. A hand took my wrist,
cold metal touched me as the handcuffs were locked. My hands felt light with relief. I must have
been standing right before the cell door because when a hand on my back pushed me forward I
stumbled inside. I was still blindfolded, but I felt the consistency of the darkness change: it grew
thicker, I had to wade through it to feel the walls. That was all: walls so close together that I felt
like man in a hole. I reached down and touched a bunk. I sat down. I heard the door close. I heard
footsteps retreating. When I removed the blindfold the darkness remained the same, only now
a little air touched my face. I closed my eyes. I don't know how long I remained like that, hunched
forward on the bunk, my sore, throbbing feet on the floor, my elbows on my knees, my eyes
closed.
As if realizing how close I was to tears, the smells got up from
their corners, shook the dust off their buttocks and lined up to make my acquaintance--to distract
me from my sad thoughts. I shook their hands one by one: Loneliness Smell, Anger Smell,
Waiting Smell, Masturbation Smell, Fear Smell; it filled the tiny room from floor to ceiling,
edging out the others. I did not cry. I opened my lips and slowly, like a Buddhist chanting
his mantra, I prayed:
Let this one also pass over me, lightly,
Like a smooth rock rolling down the hill,
Down my back, my skin, like soothing water.
* * *
He was in solitary for three days. This is how he described
the cell in his diary: The floor was about six feet by ten, and the ceiling was about seven
feet from the floor. There were two pieces of furniture: the iron bunk with its tattered, liced-ridden
mat, and the slop bucket in the corner.
His only contact with the outside was when his mess of beans,
once daily at six p.m., was pushed into the cell through a tiny flap at the bottom of the wrought-iron
door, and at precisely eight p.m. when the cell door was opened for him to take out the slop bucket
and replace it with a fresh one. He wrote that the only way he distinguished night from day was
by the movement of his bowels--in hunger or in purgation.
Then on the third day, late in the evening, things began to happen.
Like Nichodemus, the superintendent came to him, covertly, seeking knowledge.
Third Day. Solitary Cell
When I heard metal touch the lock on the door I sat down from
my blind pacing. I composed my countenance.
| "Now I realized that I really had no 'self' to
express; that self had flown away from me the day the chains touched my hands. What
is left here is nothing but a mass of protruding bones, unkempt hair and tearful eyes;
an asshole for shitting and farting, and a penis that in the mornings grows turgid in
vain." |
The door opened, bringing in unaccustomed rays
of light. I blinked. 'Oh, sweet light, may your face meeting mine bring me good fortune.' When
my eyes had adjusted to the light, the superintendent was standing on the threshold--the cell entrance
was a tight, brightly lit frame around his looming form. He advanced into the cell and stood in the
centre, before me in my disadvantaged position on the bunk. His legs were planted apart, like an A.
He looked like a cartoon figure: his jodhpur-like uniform trousers emphasized the skinniness of his
calves, where they disappeared into the glass-glossy boots. His stomach bulged and hung like a
belted sack. He cleared his voice. When I looked at his face I saw his blubber lips twitching with the
effort of an attempted smile. But he couldn't quite carry it off. He started to speak, then stopped
abruptly and began to pace the tiny space before the bunk. When he returned to his original position
he stopped. Now I noticed the sheaf of papers in his hands. He gestured in my face with it.
'These. Are the. Your papers.' His English was more disfigured
than usual. He was soaking wet with the effort of saying whatever it was he wanted to say. 'I read.
All. I read your file again. Also. You are journalist. This is your second year. Here. Awaiting trial.
For organizing violence. Demonstration against. Anti-government demonstration against the
military legal government.' He did not thunder as usual.
'It is not true.'
'Eh?' The surprise on his face was comical. 'You deny?'
I did not organize a demonstration. I went there as a reporter.'
'Well...' He shrugged. 'That is not my business. The truth. Will come
out at your. Trial.'
'But when will that be? I have been forgotten. I am not allowed a
lawyer, or visitors. I have been awaiting trial for two years now...'
'Do you complain? Look. Twenty years I've worked in prisons
all over this country. Nigeria. North. South. East. West. Twenty years. Don't be stupid. Sometimes
it is better this way. How. Can you win a case against government? Wait. Hope.'
Now he lowered his voice, like a conspirator. 'Maybe there'll be another
coup, eh? Maybe the leader will collapse and die. He is mortal, after all. Maybe a civilian government
will come. Then. There will be amnesty. Don't worry. Enjoy yourself.'
I looked at him, planted before me like a tree, his hands clasped behind
him, the papier-mâché smile on his lips. Enjoy yourself. I turned the phrase over and over in
my mind. When I lay to sleep rats kept me awake, and mosquitoes, and lice, and hunger, and loneliness.
The rats bit at my toes and scuttled around in the low ceiling, sometimes falling on to my face from the
holes in the ceiling. Enjoy yourself.
'Your papers,' he said, thrusting them at me once more. I was not sure
if he was offering them to me. 'I read them. All. Poems. Letters. Poems, no problem. The letters, illegal.
I burned them. Prisoners sometimes smuggle out letters to the press to make us look foolish. Embarrass
the government. But the poems are harmless. Love poems. And diaries. You wrote the poems for your
girl, isn't it?'
He bent forward, and clapped a hand on my shoulder. I realized with wonder
that the man, in his awkward, flat-footed way, was making overtures of friendship to me. My eyes fell on
the boot that had stepped on my neck just five days ago. What did he want?
'Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don't know
poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare.'
It was apparent that he wanted to talk about poems, but he was finding it
hard to begin.
'What do you want?' I asked.
He drew back to his full height. 'I write poems too. Sometimes,' he added
quickly when the wonder grew and grew on my face. He dipped his hand into his jacket pocket and came
out with a foolscap sheet of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to me. 'Read.'
It was a poem; handwritten. The title was written in capital letters: 'MY
LOVE FOR YOU.'
Like a man in a dream, I ran my eyes over the bold squiggles. After the first
stanza I saw that it was a thinly veiled imitation of one of my poems. I sensed his waiting. He was hardly
breathing. I let him wait. Lord, I can't remember another time when I had felt so good. So powerful. I was
Samuel Johnson and he was an aspiring poet waiting anxiously for my verdict, asking tremulously, 'Sir,
is it poetry, is it Pindar?'
I wanted to say, with as much sarcasm as I could put into my voice, 'Sir,
your poem is both original and interesting, but the part that is interesting is not original, and the part that
is original is not interesting.' But all I said was, 'Not bad, you need to work on it some more.'
The eagerness went out of his face and for a fleeting moment the scowl
returned. 'I promised my lady a poem. She is educated, you know. A teacher. You will write a poem for
me. For my lady.'
'You want me to write a poem for you?' I tried to mask the surprise, the
confusion and, yes, the eagerness in my voice. He was offering me a chance to write.
'I am glad you understand. Her name is Janice. She has been to the university.
She has class. Not like other girls. She teaches in my son's school. That is how we met.'
Even jailers fall in love, I thought inanely.
'At first she didn't take me seriously. She thought I only wanted to use her
and dump her. And. Also. We are of different religion. She is Christian, I am Muslim. But no problem. I love her.
But she still doubted. I did not know what to do. Then I saw one of your poems ... yes, this one.' He handed me
the poem. 'It said everything I wanted to tell her.'
It was one of my early poems, rewritten from memory.
'"Three Words". I gave it to her yesterday when I took her out.'
'You gave her my poem?'
'Yes.
'You ... you told her you wrote it?'
Yes, yes, of course. I wrote it again in my own hand,' he said, unabashed. He
had been speaking in a rush; now he drew himself together and, as though to reassert his authority, began to
pace the room, speaking in a subdued, measured tone. 'I can make life easy for you here. I am the prison superintendent.
There is nothing I cannot do, if I want. So write. The poem. For me.'
There is nothing I cannot do. You can get me cigarettes, I am sure, and food.
You can remove me from solitary. But can you stand me outside these walls, free under the stars? Can you connect
the tips of my upraised arms to the stars so that the surge of liberty passes down my body to the soft downy
grass beneath my feet?
I asked for paper and pencil. And a book to read.
* * *
He was removed from the solitary section
that day. The pencil and paper came, the book too. But not the one he had asked for. He wanted Wole Soyinka's
prison notes, The Man Died; but when it came it was A Brief History of West Africa. While writing
the poems in the cell, Lomba would sometimes let his mind wander; he'd picture the superintendent and his lady
out on a date, how he'd bring out the poem and unfold it and hand it to her and say boldly, 'I wrote it for you.
Myself.'
* * *
They sit outside on the verandah at
her suggestion. The light from the hanging, wind-swayed Chinese lanterns falls softly on them. The breeze
blowing from the lagoon below smells fresh to her nostrils; she loves its dampness on her bare arms and face.
She looks at him across the circular table, with its vase holding a single rose. He appears nervous. A thin film
of sweat covers his forehead. He removes his cap and dabs at his forehead with a white handkerchief.
'Do you like it, a Chinese restaurant?' he asks, like a father anxious to please
his favourite child. It is their first outing together. He pestered her until she gave in. Sometimes she is at a loss
what to make of his attentions. She sighs. She turns her plump face to the deep, blue lagoon. A white boat with
dark stripes on its sides speeds past; a figure is crouched inside, almost invisible. Her light, flower-patterned
gown shivers in the light breeze. She watches him covertly. He handles his chopsticks awkwardly, but
determinedly.
'Waiter!' he barks, his mouth full of fish, startling her. 'Bring another bottle of
wine!'
'No. I am all right, really,' she says firmly, putting down her chopsticks.
* * *
After the meal, which has been
quite delicious, he lifts the tiny, wine-filled porcelain cup before him and says: 'To you. And me.'
She sips her drink, avoiding his eyes.
I love you, Janice. Very much. I know you think I am not serious. That I only
want to suck. The juice and throw away the peel. No.' He suddenly dips his hand into the pocket of his
well-ironed white kaftan and brings out a yellow paper.
'Read and see.' He pushes the paper across the table to her. 'I wrote it.
For you. A poem.'
She opens the paper. It smells faintly of sandalwood. She looks at the title:
'Three Words'. She reaches past the vase with its single, white rose, past the wine bottle, the wine glasses,
and covers his hairy hand with hers briefly. 'Thank you.'
She reads the poem, shifting in her seat towards the swaying light of the
lantern:
Three words
When I hear the waterfall clarity of your laughter,
When I see the twilight softness of your eyes,
I feel like draping you all over myself, like a cloak,
To be warmed by your warmth.
Your flower-petal innocence, your perennial
Sapling resilience - your endless charms
All these set my mind on wild flights of fancy:
I add word unto word,
I compare adjectives and coin exotic phrases
But they all seem jaded, corny, unworthy
Of saying all I want to say to you.
So I take refuge in these simple words,
Trusting my tone, my hand in yours, when I
Whisper them, to add depth and new
Twists of meaning to them. Three words:
I love you.
* * *
With his third or fourth poem
for the superintendent, Lomba began to send Janice cryptic messages. She seemed to possess an
insatiable appetite for love poems. Every day a warder came to the cell, in the evening, with the
same request from the superintendent: 'The poem.' When he finally ran out of original poems, Lomba
began to plagiarize the masters from memory. Here are the opening lines of one:
Janice, your beauty is to me
Like those treasures of gold ...
Another one starts:
I wonder, my heart, what you and I
Did till we loved ...
But it was Lomba's bowdlerization of Sappho's 'Ode' that brought the
superintendent to the cell door:
A peer of goddesses she seems to me
The lady who sits over against me
Face to face,
Listening to the sweet tones of my voice,
And the loveliness of my laughing.
It is this that sets my heart fluttering
In my chest,
For if I gaze on you but for a little while
I am no longer master of my voice,
And my tongue lies useless
And a delicate flame runs over my skin
No more do I see with my eyes;
The sweat pours down me
I am all seized with trembling
And I grow paler than the grass
My strength fails me
And I seem little short of dying.
He came to the cell door less than twenty minutes after the poem had
reached him, waving the paper in the air, a real smile splitting his granite face.
'Lomba, come out!' he hollered through the iron bars. Lomba was lying
on his wafer-thin mattress, on his back, trying to imagine figures out of the rain designs on the ceiling.
The door officer hastily threw open the door
The superintendent threw a friendly arm over Lomba's shoulders. He
was unable to stand still. he walked Lomba up and down the grassy courtyard.
'This poem. Excellent. With this poem. After. I'll ask her for marriage.' He
was incoherent in his excitement. He raised the paper and read aloud the first line, straining his eyes in
the daylight: '"A peer of goddesses she seems to me". Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think
I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?'
He stood before Lomba, bent forward expectantly, his legs planted in
their characteristic A formation.
'Why not?' Lomba answered. A passing warder stared at the superintendent
and the prisoner curiously. Twilight fell dully on the broken bottles studded in the concrete of the prison
wall.
'Yes. Why not. Good.' The superintendent walked up and down, his hands
clasped behind him, his head bowed in thought. Finally, he stopped before Lomba and declared gravely:
'Tonight. I'll ask her.'
Lomba smiled at him, sadly. The superintendent saw the smile; he did not
see the sadness.
'Good. You are happy. I am happy too. I'll send you a packet of cigarettes.
Two packets. Today. Enjoy. Now go back inside.'
He turned abruptly on his heels and marched away.
September
Janice came to see me two days after I wrote her the Sappho. I thought, she
has discovered my secret messages, my scriptive Morse tucked innocently in the lines of the poems I've
written her.
Two o'clock is compulsory siesta time. The opening of the cell door brought
me awake. My limbs felt heavy and lifeless. I feared I might have an infection. The warder came directly to
me.
'Oya, get up. The superintendent wan see you.' His skin was coarse, coal black.
He was fat and his speech came out in laboured gasps. 'Oya, get up,' he repeated impatiently.
I was in that lethargic, somnambulistic state condemned people surely fall into
when, in total inanition and despair, they await their fate--without fear or hope, because nothing can be
changed. No dew-wet finger of light would come poking into the parched gloom of the abyss they tenant.
I did not want to write any more poems for the superintendent's lover. I did not want any more of his cigarettes.
I was tired of being pointed at behind my back, of being whispered about by the other inmates as the
superintendent's informer, his fetch-water. I wanted to recover my lost dignity. Now I realized that I really
had no 'self' to express; that self had flown away from me the day the chains touched my hands. What is
left here is nothing but a mass of protruding bones, unkempt hair and tearful eyes; an asshole for shitting
and farting, and a penis that in the mornings grows turgid in vain. This leftover self, this sea-bleached wreck
panting on the iron-filing sands of the shores of this penal island is nothing but hot air, and hair, and ears
cocked, hopeful ...
So I said to the warder, 'I don't want to see him today. Tell him I'm sick.'
The fat face contorted. He raised his baton in Pavlovian response. 'What!' But
our eyes met. He was smart enough to decipher the bold 'No Trespassing' sign written in mine. Smart enough
to obey. He moved back, shrugging. 'Na you go suffer!' he blustered, and left.
I was aware of the curious eyes staring at me. I closed mine. I willed my mind
over the prison walls to other places. Free.
| "Lomba was seated in a dingy cell in Gashuwa,
his eyes closed, his mind soaring above the glass-studded prison walls, mingling with the stars
and the rain in elemental union of freedom; then the door clanked open, and when he opened
his eyes Liberty was standing over him, smiling kindly, extending an arm. And Liberty said softly,
'Come. It is time to go.' And they left, arm in arm." |
I dreamt of standing under the stars, my hands raised, their tips
touching the blinking, pulsating electricity of the stars. The rain would be falling. There'd be nothing else:
just me and rain and stars and my feet on the wet, downy grass earthing the electricity of freedom.
He returned almost immediately. There was a smirk on his fat face as he handed
me a note. I recognized the superintendent's clumsy scrawl. It was brief, a one-liner: Janice is here. Come.
Now. Truncated, even in writing. I got up and pulled on my sweat-grinned shirt. I slipped my feet into my
old, worn-out slippers. I followed the warder. We passed the parade ground, and the convicted men's compound.
An iron gate, far to our right, locked permanently, led to the women's wing of the prison. We passed the old
laundry, which now served as a barber's shop on Saturdays--the prison's sanitation day. A gun-carrying warder
opened a tiny door in the huge gate that led into a foreyard where the prison officials had their offices. I had been
here before, once, on my first day in prison. There were cars parked before the offices; cadets in their well-starched
uniforms came and went, their young faces looking comically stern. Female secretaries with time on their hands
stood in the corridors gossiping. The superintendent's office was not far from the gate; a flight of three concrete
steps led up to a thick wooden door, which bore the single word: SUPERINTENDENT.
My guide knocked on it timidly before turning the handle.
'The superintendent wan see am,' he informed the secretary. She barely looked up
from her typewriter; she nodded. Her eyes were bored, uncurious.
'Enter,' the warder said to me, pointing to a curtained doorway beside the secretary's
table. I entered. A lady sat in one of the two visitors' armchairs. Back to the door, her elbows rested on the huge
Formica-topped table before her. Janice. She is alone. When she turned, I noted that my mental image of her was
almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely. She came halfway out of her chair, turning it slightly
so that it faced the other chair. There was a tentative smile on her face as she asked, 'Mr Lomba?'
I almost said no, surprised by the 'Mr'. I nodded.
She pointed at the empty chair. 'Please sit down.' She extended a soft, pudgy hand to
me. I took it and marvelled at its softness. She was a teacher; the hardness would be in the fingers: the tips of the
thumb and the middle finger, and the side of the index finger.
'Muftau--the superintendent--will be here soon. He just stepped out,' she said. Her
voice was clear, a little high-pitched. Her English was correct, each word carefully pronounced and projected. Like
in a classroom. I was struck by how clean she looked, squeaky clean; her skin glowed like a child's after a bath. She
had obviously taken a lot of trouble with her appearance: her blue evening dress looked almost new, but a slash of
red lipstick extended to the left cheek after missing the curve of the lip. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, tapping
the left foot on the floor. She was nervous. That was when I realized I had not said a word since I entered.
'Welcome to the prison,' I said, unable to think of anything else.
She nodded. 'Thank you. I told Muftau I wanted to see you. The poems, I just knew
it wasn't him writing them. I went along with it for a while, but later I told him.'
She opened the tiny handbag in her lap and took out some papers. The poems. She
put them on the table and unfolded them, smoothing out the creases, uncurling the edges. 'After the Sappho I decided
I must see you. It was my favourite poem in school, and I like your version of it.'
'Thank you,' I said. I liked her directness, her sense of humour.
'So I told him - look, I know who the writer is, he is one of the prisoners, isn't he? That
surprised him. He couldn't figure out how I knew. But I was glad he didn't deny it. I told him that. And if we are getting
married, there shouldn't be secrets between us, should there?'
Ah, I thought, so my Sappho has worked the magic. Aloud I said, 'Congratulations.'
She nodded. 'Thanks. Muftau is a nice person, really, when you get to know him. His
son, Farouk, was in my class--he's finished now--really, you should see them together. So touching. I know he has
his awkward side, and that he was once married--but I don't care. After all, I have a little past too. Who doesn't?'
She added the last quickly, as if scared she was revealing too much to a stranger. Her left hand went up and down
as she spoke, like a hypnotist, like a conductor. After a brief pause, she continued, 'After all the pain he's been
through with his other wife, he deserves some happiness. She was in the hospital a whole year before she died.'
Muftau. The superintendent had a name, and a history, maybe even a soul. I looked
at his portrait hanging on the wall. He looked young in it, serious-faced and smart, like the cadet warders outside. I
turned to her and said suddenly and sincerely, 'I am glad you came. Thanks.'
Her face broke into a wide, dimpled smile. She was actually pretty. A little past her prime,
past her sell-by date, but still nice, still viable. 'Oh, no. I am the one that should be glad. I love meeting poets. I love
poems. Really I do.'
'Not all of them are mine.'
'I know--but you give them a different feel, a different tone. And also, I discovered
your S. O. S. I had to come ...' She picked the poems off the table and handed them to me. There were thirteen of them.
Seven were my originals, six were purloined. She had carefully underlined in red ink certain lines in some of them--the
same line, actually, recurring.
There was a waiting-to-be-congratulated smile on her face as she awaited my
comment.
'You noticed,' I said.
'Of course I did. S. O. S. It wasn't apparent at first. I began to notice the repetition with
the fifth poem. "Save my soul, a prisoner."'
'Save my soul, a prisoner' ... The first time I put down the words, in the third poem, it
had been non-deliberate, I was just making alliteration. Then I began to repeat it in the subsequent poems. But how
could I tell her that the message wasn't really for her, or for anyone else? It was for myself, perhaps, written by me
to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe.
I told her, the first time I wrote it an inmate had died. His name was Thomas. He wasn't
sick. He just started vomiting after the afternoon meal, and before the warders came to take him to the clinic, he died.
Just like that. He died. Watching his stiffening face, with the mouth open and the eyes staring, as the inmates took
him out of the cell, an irrational fear had gripped me. I saw myself being taken out like that, my lifeless arms dangling,
brushing the ground. The fear made me sit down, shaking uncontrollably amidst the flurry of movements and voices
excited by the tragedy. I was scared. I felt certain I was going to end up like that. Have you ever felt like that, certain
that you are going to die? No? I did. I was going to die. My body would end up in some anonymous mortuary, and
later in an unmarked grave, and no one would know. No one would care. It happens every day here. I am a political
detainee; if I die I am just one antagonist less. That was when I wrote the S. O. S. It was just a message in a bottle,
thrown without much hope into the sea ... I stopped speaking when my hands started to shake. I wanted to put
them in my pocket to hide them from her. But she had seen it. She left her seat and came to me. She took both
my hands in hers.
'You'll not die. You'll get out alive. One day it will all be over,' she said. Her perfume,
mixed with her female smell, rose into my nostrils: flowery, musky. I had forgotten the last time a woman had stood
as close to me. Sometimes, in our cell, when the wind blows from the female prison, we'll catch distant sounds of
female screams and shouts and even laughter. That is the closest we ever come to women. Only when the wind
blows, at the right time, in the right direction. Her hands on mine, her smell, her presence, acted like fire on some
huge, prehistoric glacier locked deep in my chest. And when her hand touched my head and the back of my
neck, I wept.
When the superintendent returned, my sobbing face was buried in Janice's ample
bosom. Her hands were on my head, patting, consoling, like a mother, all the while cooing softly, 'One day it
will finish.'
I pulled away from her. She gave me her handkerchief.
'What is going on? Why is he crying?'
He was standing just within the door--his voice was curious, with a hint of jealousy.
I wiped my eyes; I subdued my body's spasms. He advanced slowly into the room and went round to his seat.
He remained standing, his hairy hands resting on the table.
'Why is he crying?' he repeated to Janice.
'Because he is a prisoner,' Janice replied simply. She was still standing beside me,
facing the superintendent.
'Well. So? Is he realizing that just now?'
'Don't be so unkind, Muftau.'
I returned the handkerchief to her.
'Muftau, you must help him.'
'Help. How?'
You are the prison superintendent. There's a lot you can do.'
'But I can't help him. He is a political detainee. He has not even been tried.'
'And you know that he is never going to be tried. He will be kept here for
ever, forgotten.' Her voice became sharp and indignant. The superintendent drew back his seat and sat
down. His eyes were lowered. When he looked up, he said earnestly, 'Janice. There's nothing anyone
can do for him. I'll be implicating myself. Besides, his lot is far easier than that of other inmates. I give
him things. Cigarettes. Soap. Books. And I let him. Write.'
'How can you be so unfeeling! Put yourself in his shoes--two years away from
friends, from family, without the power to do anything you wish to do. Two years in CHAINS! How can you
talk of cigarettes and soap, as if that were substitute enough for all that he has lost?' She was like a teacher
confronting an erring student. Her left hand tapped the table for emphasis as she spoke.
'Well.' He looked cowed. His scowl alternated rapidly with smile. He stared
at his portrait on the wall behind her. He spoke in a rush. 'Well. I could have done something. Two weeks
ago. The Amnesty International. People came. You know, white men. They wanted names of. Political
detainees held. Without trial. To pressure the government to release them.'
'Well?'
'Well.' He still avoided her stare. His eyes touched mine and hastily passed.
He picked up a pen and twirled it between his fingers. The pen slipped out of his fingers and fell on the
floor.
'I didn't. Couldn't. You know... I thought he was comfortable. And, he
was writing the poems, for you...' His voice was almost pleading. Surprisingly, I felt no anger towards
him. He was just a man. Man in his basic, rudimentary state, easily moved by powerful emotions like
love, lust, anger, greed and fear, but totally dumb to the finer, acquired emotions like pity, mercy,
humour and justice.
Janice slowly picked up her bag from the table. There was enormous
dignity to her movements. She clasped the bag under her left arm. Her words were slow, almost sad.
'I see now that I've made a mistake. You are not really the man I thought you were...'
'Janice.' He stood up and started coming round to her, but a gesture
stopped him.
'No. Let me finish. I want you to contact the people. Give them his name.
If you can't do that, then forget you ever knew me.'
Her hand brushed my arm as she passed me. He started after her, then
stopped halfway across the room. We stared in silence at the curtained doorway, listening to the sound
of her heels on the bare floor till it finally died away. He returned slowly to his seat and slumped into it.
The wood creaked audibly in the quiet office.
'Go,' he said, not looking at me.
* * *
The above is the last entry in
Lomba's diary. There's no record of how far the superintendent went to help him regain his freedom,
but as he told Janice, there was very little to be done for a political detainee--especially since, about
a week after that meeting, a coup was attempted against the military leader, General Sani Abacha, by
some officers close to him. There was an immediate crackdown on all pro-democracy activists, and
the prisons all over the country swelled with political detainees. A lot of those already in detention
were transferred randomly to other prisons around the country, for security reasons. Lomba was
among them. He was transferred to Agodi Prison in Ibadan. From there he was moved to the far north,
to small desert town called Gashuwa. There is no record of him after that.
A lot of these political prisoners died in detention, although only the
prominent ones made the headlines--people like Moshood Abiola and General Yar Adua.
But somehow it is hard to imagine that Lomba died. A lot seems to point
to the contrary. His diary, his economical expressions, show a very sedulous character at work. A survivor.
The years in prison must have taught him not to hope too much, not to despair too much--that for the
prisoner, nothing kills as surely as too much hope or too much despair. He had learned to survive in
tiny atoms, piecemeal, a day at a time. It is probable that in 1998, when the military dictator Abacha died,
and his successor, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, dared to open the gates to democracy, and to liberty
for the political detainees, Lomba was in the ranks of those released.
This might have been how it happened: Lomba was seated in a dingy cell
in Gashuwa, his eyes closed, his mind soaring above the glass-studded prison walls, mingling with the
stars and the rain in elemental union of freedom; then the door clanked open, and when he opened his
eyes Liberty was standing over him, smiling kindly, extending an arm.
And Liberty said softly, 'Come. It is time to go.'
And they left, arm in arm.
* * *
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