Commentary
By Lans Gberie, currently in Freetown.
The Sierra Leone war lasted for about a decade, longer than the Second World War. But it produced no epic battle; and, partly thanks to the bewildering Special Court for Sierra Leone, no hero on all sides. Of course we knew long before this Court, thanks all the same, that there was nothing romantic or marginally enobling about the war’s key protagonist, the so-called Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
The experience of suffering and pain that the war caused was universal; writers and journalists were not spared. Clearly, then, against this background of ruin, desolation and despair, the poet finds little to celebrate. This is a very profound challenge for any sensitive person. For the poet, it is the ultimate hurdle. When one reads Virgil, one is at once absorbed by the great majesty of Rome: even in moments of warfare, of the avenging gods wreaking horrors upon horrors, there is shining nobility. That makes for the true epic poem: and the immortal Virgil celebrates the heroisms and the tragedies and the pathos, but above the heroisms, of his very great subject, the Roman Empire. There is very little reason to hope that out of our tiny space, out of the nullity and desolation of the past decades, something as grand as Virgil will emerge. But what has emerged in the past 10 years is rather worthy of that great calling; in fact surpasses much of what was produced in the previous 30 years.
I refer, of course, to the very interesting and important literary development involving poetry. More than any other literary form except perhaps music, poetry in Sierra Leone in recent years has shown great promise and even some fulfilment. An incomplete index compiled about six years ago by Peter Andersen’s Sierra Leone Web featured more than 60 poets and many more titles, but some of the best poets are not represented; and Andersen, now a spokesman for the Special Court, has not returned to it. There is a certain paradox about the fact that such a destructive war could fuel such immense creativity, about the licence of terror leading to unhindered free expression of the sort that these poets represent. Here I will let Elvis Gbanabom Hallowell, one of the best poets in this category, speak about this in “We No Longer Write Poems in Camera”:
“No longer do we write poems in camera
with helicopters hovering over our heads
enervating the sticking fingers
of our branches which like the sierra
now stand unkempt
“Illogical though we may seem
like languages falling down babel
our poems are read all over the place
from Freetown to Conakry
where the malarial mosquito expends
from Rwanda to Soweto
where black blood illustrates the future
before each of liquid
surges to fill helpless skeletons”.
One can easily ignore the melodrama about the “helicopter hovering over our heads”: that’s delicious poetic license, to extend the pathos. The point is that a lot of the poems that have emerged can be described, even if loosely, as war poems. I say loosely because the war is very largely background: none of the poets – in sharp contrast to the prominent English poets (Owen and Sassoon) who emerged out of the trenches of World War I – fought in the war, and most were based either in Freetown or abroad throughout the war.
Our poets – from Hallowell, Oumar Farouk Sesay, Abass Collier, Sheik Umar Kamarah, Mohamed Gibril Sesay, Moses Twawo and several others – tend to be highly educated, some of them well-traveled, with links (in varying degrees) to Western universities or other institutions. The form of their work is self-consciously artistic: while they have all experimented with various forms, trying to be as unconventional as possible, their work, though beautifully creative, easily sits within the broad canon, familiar and recognisable. In Kenema in September last year, however, I got to meet another kind of artist: an extraordinary poet whose sensitivity and talent are deeply visceral, a kind of miracle of circumstance. And George Tengbe’s other day job is just as exotic: he sells herbal concoctions he makes as cure for rheumatism, part of that quaint profession once called apothecary – though a grossly unkind description would be mountebank. I was introduced to him at a crummy restaurant by my old friend Timothy Sowa. Particularly in Tengbe’s work, who wrote throughout from his beleaguered base in Kenema (a Dickensian environment if there ever was one, complete with its grandly ugly shambolic pseudo-fascist architecture, the so-called Clock Tower at the centre of the town, a mock mock-Mughal structure) one senses a variation on the situation that Graham Greene called “the pathos of betwixt and between,” of a highly sensitive and cultivated man trying hard to remain sane in an era dominated by brutes – and not particularly succeeding…
The outputs of these talents are, not surprisingly, completely devoid of romance or sentimentality; the least severe that they manage is pathos. Gone in their poems are the loving, nostalgic verses of Gladys Casely-Hayford, who wrote of Freetown in the 1920s thus: ‘Freetown, when God made thee, He made thy soil alone/…’This is my gem!’ God whispered, ‘this shall be/To me a jewel in blue turquoise set’/…There, tranquilly lies Freetown, even yet/Then God crouched, lion-like, each mighty hill/Silent, they keep their watch o’er Freetown still.” That eternal Other Worldly watch was doubtless not vigilant enough, for the poems of Casely-Hayford’s heirs depict a bleak, desolate and cruel landscape, violated and unprotected. Kamarah’s “Child of War and Other Poems” depicts this grim landscape; and so does, in a more attenuated form, the poems of Oumar Farouk Sesay’s in his wonderful anthology, “Salute to the Remains of a Peasant” (PublishAmerica, 2007).
Sesay, an old friend, gave me a copy of this anthology in his car a couple of weeks ago. We were driving in downtown Freetown and suddenly Sesay’s stereo released the booming, melodious voice of Tom Caurray, who died in great dereliction recently, reading his own poem. It was a very angry, immensely affecting poem, a vitriol on the sad state of affairs in his country, of hopes betrayed, of “barbarians” calling themselves ‘rebels’ committing terrible depredations, and of politicians acting as if accomplices of these thugs. I had met Caurray back in 1995. He had been expelled – he told me then – as a lecturer at Milton Margai by the school’s principal (one Kargbo) for being very critical of the then ruling junta, National Provisional Ruling Council, NPRC. Caurray was a pamphleteer in the best tradition of that genre – think of Tom Paine. I didn’t know then that he was a poet as well. I was traveling to Ghana the week that Sesay told me about Caurray’s death, so I could not attend the celebration of his work that Sesay and Hallowell were planning. I therefore took Sesay’s anthology with great enthusiasm: I wanted to enter the minds of these admirable compatriots of mine.
It was somewhat chastening reading this crisp, sometimes didactic and mostly pained reflections in the salubrious setting of the Royal Richester hotel in Accra (built by a young Ghanaian American football star). There are 106 poems in all, all short and sharp. One of the poems is in fact entitled simply “Pain.” “On this scorched landscape/Of my mind/Underneath these concrete slabs/Adorned with epitaphs on mangled tablet/Lay the immortal remains/Of my country’s pain.” “My country’s pain”: I thought that the poet perhaps added the word ‘pain’ here simply as an afterthought: the poem at first reads like an epitaph on his country. But then read on: “The pain of paradise periled/In the rice fields of Mangebureh/The pain of impunity/In the court rooms of justice.” So there is paradise, after-all? And one with “court rooms”?
There is a very moving poem, “Letter to an Imprisoned Journalist,” perhaps modelled on Syl Cheney-Coker’s very powerful and beautifully realised “Letter to a Tormented Playwright” (“But who can shut up the rage the melodrama of being Sierra Leone?/The farce of seeing their pictures daily in the papers/The knowledge that though blindfolded and muzzled/Something is growing, bloating, volumptuous and not Despairing”.)
The journalist is – I am guessing here – Sesay’s friend and former college-mate, Lansana Fofana, imprisoned in 1989 (when the self-adoring General Momoh was in power) by a sub-literate, semi-barbarous judge who averred, in irony-free language, that journalism in the country was “a drastic disease.” “Dear Lansana/I was told you are imprisoned/For contempt of contempt/But I don’t know the prison.” The poet does not know whether the prison is the same that imprisons paupers “for the crime of poverty,” or where “the reasoning of prime thinkers is imprisoned.” “Lansana, tell me what prison?”
Cheney-Coker – Sierra Leone’s greatest poet – writes the introduction to this volume; and he highlights a particularly mordant poem entitled “Dream”. I have hinted at the price, a vision limited, that obsession with bleakness can exact; but in this poem Sesay balances this (perhaps unavoidable) vision very deliciously: “Don’t let go your dream/Cling to it, like a mother/In a war-ravaged land/Will cling to a dying child.” The image is startling, terrifying; but the subject of hope is an immensely reassuring one after all the grimness.
Hope, they say, springs eternal: we must cling to it as a nation; and with all these marvellous talents, we may yet emerge from our persistent decrepitude and desolation feeling buoyant and very happy, Casely-Hayford’s dream come true…
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