By
Anote Ajeluorou
Germany-based
Aka Teraka’s collection of poems Palm Lines (Boxwood Publishing House,
U.S.; 2012), which can only be obtained online at Amazon for now, is a lyrical
delight, an offering that coalesces thoughts about diverse issues into one tidy
whole. The volume is moving poetry that takes the reader through the many
labyrinths of Teraka’s very fertile imagination as he ruminates on the human
condition and tries to locate himself within that broad canvas.
The five-part poetry collection is at once a journey and a destination both for
the author and those fortunate to read it. It also casts a backward and forward
glance at his roots and his current shared space in a foreign land and the
contradictory intersections that shape the lived experiences. For an artist –
musician, poet and linguist living abroad, in Germany, Teraka’s very
exploratory and experiential poetry offers an avenue to the human spirit in
quest of freedom through the few chinks it can find and the joys awaiting it on
the other side.
But particularly, the notion of love in its many ambivalent shapes and contours
runs through this compact collection. It is a love shaped by many experiences
not least is the love for a woman, in this case, a white woman. Intermingled
with this love is the anguish of exile and the longing for a troubled home
still mired in self-ruination at its inability to create order. But in all of
this, there is the poet’s self-exultation that, as a free spirit, he is still
able to find joy in small things, not least, the love of his woman and the
inescapable hope that the future can only get better.
From Part 1 ‘The Cracked Mirror’s Bottom’, which pertain to things gone awry
and the loss of innocence or complete loss of human direction. But in all
these, there’s the faint hope of renewal, as the poet reflects in the poem,
‘Resurfacing’, ‘Your disgrace/Reflected on my bottom/Wiped with tears across
your lost face/Mirrored in anguish ambush- / Be of good cheer-/The dew/Washed
the exposed leaf clean each time/The cock crows again.’
Always, the poet’s humanity comes to the fore with his expressed belief in the
possibility of a dignified human spirit and what it can do in spite of the many
shackles ranged against it. It is this triumph of the human spirit that Teraka
sings most joyfully about even during moments of acute despair occasioned by
acts of human error that sometimes plunge humanity into the abyss.
This position he affirms in the poem, ‘The Thirst Commandment’, when he says in
the last stanza, ‘Understanding is/A fragment of that/Cracked mirror’s
bottom./Return from space ship/Bewildered scientist/The greater mystery is
humanity’. Here, there is abiding faith in humanity as healing point to a
chaotic world. What is uppermost is ‘understanding’ as precondition to the
‘cracked mirror’s bottom’ or the fragmented world.
He encounters this ‘cracked mirror’s bottom’ in his love relationship with his
‘white wife’ in the racial slurs that easily mire such black and white love
affairs. In spite of this racial madness, the poet persona is startled that the
woman he loves sticks by him nonetheless. Not even the ending of that
relationship, as it often happens, sways the persona otherwise, when he says
almost in triumphant irony, ‘Love is a mysterious path/If you see me crying
bitterly, do not comfort me/My joy is an enigmatic wonder performed by my
pain.’
In Part 2 ‘Crunchteeth of Reality’, Teraka takes a look at the harsh reality in
his home land and the gruelling conditions that daily assail lives from armed
robberies to plane crashes to thieving politicians and bad governance. In ‘The
Goodbye Bird’, Teraka, like most of his countrymen and women, is tired of the
frequent plane crashes that cause loss of lives. So, he says, ‘Tell your
master/Trust is no flight of mere imagination/That will rise again from its
ashes/When it dips and crashes…/The very sky/has spat us out/in discontent!’
On the corrupt political actors waging a war against the people, he asserts in
‘Oil-drunkard’, ‘Tolotolo longa throat/Oil-drinker/I hear you coughing…/Your cough
syrup is counterfeit/Shipped in from India or China/Fake drugs, Swiss accounts,
a hundred mansions/Will not get rid of the black smoke/Stuck in your throat/So
come… let slap your back!’ Or is it the hypocrisy plaguing the land in the
guise of religion? Teraka is humourless, as he states in the last stanza of
‘Intersecular’, ‘Monday is the new Sunday./If you want to meet God,/Look for
Him on Monday-/On Sunday, Saturday and Friday He is far away/Tired of our
hypocrisy.’
In Part 3 ‘Kissing the Palm Groove’, Teraka goes back to the theme of love as
the all-healing balm to a troubled world, as he sings in ‘And there was life’,
‘’Tis no cliché/When God said let there be love/We heard let there be light’.
In ‘Tracing The Palm Groove’, he also asserts that in spite of the differences
people tend to see in the world, the one unifying vision is love that melts
boundaries of colour, race, religion and ideology, ‘Like a glove/Her palm fit
into mine/I saw her struggling/with the shock/Recognition brought.../ We clasp
hands and become a palm nation’.
The symbolism of palm as peace offering in both African and Christian religious
theology is tellingly asserted in this poem as with the collection’s title Palm
Lines.
In
Part 4 ‘Free Spirit’, the poet pursues the artistic ideal of the human spirit
free to roam in a world without the inhibiting boundaries society often imposes
on those willing to seek and dare beyond the ordinary. In Part 5 ‘Come-Promised
Land’, Teraka takes his quest to a promised future of possible bliss. But in
exile, he finds this almost impossible and is forced to look backwards to his
home land for possible redemption of his humanity that exile often abuses in
its many nuanced rejections.
So in ‘Renaissance’, his ambivalent is ripe like a puss, ‘I thought it was a
river running/But the Niger is quiet these days/Silenced at gunpoint/Now the
iroko too seeks refuge over seas…/Look back! Your roots are tugging at
you/Awaken from your winter sleep!’ The last poem becomes an anthem of sorts to
hopeful sojourns in foreign lands from an insider, one who still lives there.
It’s ominously three short stanzas sum up the reality of foreign lands,
especially what Europe really is: Rather than give anything to those seeking a
better life over there, Europe gives a huge lie instead, ‘They are taking,
taking/what they lack/More than what they give-/they need More to live.’
Simply put, Teraka’s is an accomplished collection of lyrical poems that
dredges the totality of the human condition on its chosen subjects. It’s a
joyful read!
No comments:
Post a Comment