Teju Cole on Nairobi: death and birdsong, death and poetry
Honored to be part of this tomorrow. RT @SMHayFest: #KofiAwoonor memorial tribute at the National Museum, 23rd September between 6 and 9 pm.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 22, 2013
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Then comes the first of two tweets in which Cole judiciously balances the tragically human and blithely natural worlds, including in his tweet a short soundscape in which those voices are woven together in counterpoint:
Nairobi, September 23, 2013: Attack Helicopters and Birdsong. http://t.co/rqFfqtv6Gw
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 23, 2013
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This one is grim — suitable, or a bit overstated, with its echo of the Holocaust? — a question best left to individual taste, perhaps:
The sky goes dark. That smoke is people.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 23, 2013
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And then his second polyphonic melding of sounds natural and human-made, joyous and terrifying:
Nairobi, September 23, 2013. Gunfire in the distance. Birdsong at my window. Children's voices next door. https://t.co/4kSyEMWVZh
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 23, 2013
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He returns to his friend’s death…
If you're in Nairobi, please join us for a tribute to Professor Kofi Awoonor tonight at 7 pm at the Leakey Auditorium, National Museum.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 23, 2013
At the memorial for Professor Awoonor last night. May his gentle soul be ferried in peace to the new world. pic.twitter.com/dUxvQLJL9W
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 24, 2013
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And then again to birdsong, to the natural world, to the world in which the events of the past days are framed…
Clear soprano yellow of birdsong. At the National Museum the elephant continues to sleep its two million year fossil sleep.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 24, 2013
This too: with care and gymnastic balance, the great storks on the trees along Mombasa Road attend to their new chicks.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) September 24, 2013
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There is something powerfully moving about Cole’s tweeted reflections, and I believe they take their impact from the precision with which Cole himself frames and balances the horror with beauty.
Just today, my friend Jessie Daniels posted a tweet that caught my eye:
ICYMI: From Tweet to Blog Post to Peer-Reviewed Article: How to be a Scholar Now http://t.co/qw1uunKDye
— JessieNYC (@JessieNYC) September 26, 2013
Teju Cole has gone from a tweet to a blog post on the New Yorker site in a matter of days. Here’s just a brief taster:
The massacre did not end neatly. It became a siege. In my hotel room, about half a mile from the mall, I was woken in the mornings that followed by the sounds of gunfire, heavy artillery, attack helicopters, and military planes. In counterpoint to these frightening sounds were others: incessant birdsong outside my window, the laughter of children from the daycare next door. I read Awoonor’s poems, and watched a column of black smoke rise from the mall in the distance. The poems’ uncanny prophetic force became inescapable. A section of “Hymn to My Dumb Earth” reads:
What has not happened before?
An animal has caught me,
it has me in its claws
Someone, someone, save
Save me, someone,
for I die.
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But you should really read the whole thing: Letter from Nairobi: “I will say it before death comes”.
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zen:
September 27th, 2013 at 3:54 am
A beautiful post Charles.
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There’s a curious and often tragic historical legacy of poets and politics. I have been reading a long and academic history of Fascist Italy and one the points made was about Gabrielle D’Annunzio in his romantic nationalist seizure of Fiume being a John the Baptist figure and enabler of “new politics”to Mussolini’s Fascist Messiah, Lord Byron was moved by political ideals to his death while both Mao and Stalin were poets ( Stalin, who Simon Sebag Montefiore reports was talented enough a poet to impress Georgia’s national poet laureate while an unknown young man, seemed to have dropped the pretension. Mao never did). I have never heard of Awanoor before – he seems to have been a radical in his youth of the Fanon-Nkrumah variety, it’s deeply ironic that he perished as an old and apparently revered man at the hands of radicals of an entirely different kind
Charles Cameron:
September 27th, 2013 at 2:17 pm
Thanks, Zen.
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I haven’t studied Yeats’ political life, but Willian Irwin Thompson’s first book was on the Irish revolution of 1916, and had as its thesis:
That’s a very interesting insight. WB Yeats asked in his later years whether his own writing had had mortal impact:
As for China, writing poetry was a necessary skill for a gentleman / bureaucrat / member of the officer corps, no? So showing himself able to do a competent — though not necessarily literarily top flight — job of it might have been Mao following a well-worn path. Do we know whether he thought of himself as a “great” poet?
Charles Cameron:
September 27th, 2013 at 2:21 pm
BTW, Teju Cole tweeted me: “I appreciate your kind words and thoughts. Thanks.” Very gracious, i thought.