Collected Poems (5 page)

LINE 14:
the widow of infinite faith
refers to the story of the widow of Sarephath in the First Book of Kings, chapter
17
.

LINE 18:
Old Tortoise's miraculous feast:
Once upon a time Tortoise went to work for an old woman, and at the end of his labors she set before him a bowl containing a lone cocoyam sitting on a mound of cooked green leaves. Naturally, Tortoise protested vehemently and refused to touch such a meager meal. In the end, however, he was persuaded, still protesting, to give it a try. Then he discovered to his amazement (and nearly his undoing) that another cocoyam always appeared in the bowl as soon as he ate the previous one.

LINE 24:
the primordial quarrel of Earth and Sky:
This was a dispute over who was sovereign. It led finally to Sky's withholding of rain for seven whole years, until the ground became hard as iron and the dead could not be buried. Only then did Earth sue for peace, sending high-flying Vulture as emissary.

LINE 30:
new aluminum coins:
A completely unsuccessful effort was made in Biafra to peg galloping prices by introducing new
coins of a lower denomination than the paper money that had come in earlier. But it was too late. The market, having already settled for the five-shilling currency note as its smallest medium of exchange, paid no heed to the new coins.

LINE 5:
A Japanese general named Tomayuki Yamashita was hanged by the Americans at the end of the Second World War for war crimes committed by troops under his nominal command in the Philippines.

The Igbo people around my hometown, Ogidi, had an annual observance called Oso Nwanadi. On the night preceding it, all able-bodied men in the village took flight and went into hiding in neighboring villages in order to escape the ire of Nwanadi or dead kindred killed in war.

Although the Igbo people admire courage and valor they do not glamorize death, least of all death in battle. They have no Valhalla concept; the dead hero bears the living a grudge. Life is the “natural” state; death is tolerable only when it leads again to life—to reincarnation. Two sayings of the Igbo will illustrate their attitude toward death:

1. A person who cries because he is sick, what will they do who are dead?
   

2. Before a dead man is reincarnated an emaciated man will recover his flesh.
   

This poem is an elaboration of a traditional Igbo dirge.

In some parts of Igbo land the death of a young person was first publicized by members of his or her age grade chanting through the village in a make-believe search for their missing comrade, who they insisted was only playing hide-and-seek with them.

The refrain of their chant,
nzomalizo
, is made up of
zo
, which means
hide
, and
mali
, which is a playful sound. The repeat of
zo
and the linking
mali
complete the effect of
hiding in play. Ugboko
is the personification of the tropical forest, while
Iyi
personifies the stream.
Ogbonuke
is the embodiment of ill will and catastrophe.

LINE 8:
Leaves of cocoyam come in handy for wrapping small and delicate things. For instance, before storage, kola nuts are wrapped in cocoyam leaves to preserve them from desiccation. However, cocoyam leaves are not for rough handling as Vulture learned to his cost when he received from the hands of an appeased Sky a bundle of rain wrapped in them to take home to drought-stricken Earth.

LINE 10:
abia
drums beaten at the funeral of an Igbo titled man. The dance itself is also called
abia
and is danced by the dead man's peers while he lies in state and finally by two men bearing his coffin before it is taken for burial; so he goes to his ancestors by a final
rite de passage
in solemn paces of dance.

The Igbo people have a firm belief in the duality of things. Nothing is by itself, nothing is absolute. “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life” would be meaningless in Igbo theology. They say that a man may be right by Udo and yet be killed by Ogwugwu; in other words, he may worship one god to perfection and yet fall foul of another.

Igbo proverbs bring out this duality of existence very well. Take any proverb that puts forward a point of view or a “truth” and you can always find another that contradicts it or at least puts a limitation on the absoluteness of its validity.

LINE 12:
Ogbaku:
Many years ago a strange and terrible thing happened in the small village of Ogbaku. A lawyer driving on the highway that passes by that village ran over a man. The villagers, thinking the man had been killed, set upon the lawyer and clubbed him to death. Then to their horror, their man began to stir. So, the story went, they set upon him too and finished him off, saying, “You can't come back having made us do that.”

The attitude of Igbo people to their gods is sometimes ambivalent. This arises from a worldview that sees the land of the spirits as a territorial extension of the human domain. Each sphere has its functions as well as its privileges in relation to the other. Thus a man is not entirely without authority in dealing with the spirit world nor entirely at its mercy. The deified spirits of his ancestors look after his welfare; in return he regularly offers them sustenance in the form of sacrifice. In such a reciprocal relationship one is encouraged (within reason) to try to get the better of the bargain.

LINE 10:
acknowledged my face in broken dirges:
One of the songs that accompany the dead to the burial place at nightfall has these lines:

LINE 24:
creation's day of gifts:
We all choose our gifts, our character, our fate from the Creator just before we make our journey into the world. The sacred python did not choose (like some other snakes) the terror of the fang and venom, and yet it received a presence more overpowering than theirs.

The Christian claim of victory over death, is to the unconverted villager, one of the really puzzling things about the faith. Are these Christians just naive or plain hypocritical?

Lines provoked by the news that a street in the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt had been named after Britain's prime minister Harold Wilson.

This poem is in three short movements. The first is the inquirer (onye ajuju); the second, the mediating diviner (dibia), who frames the inquiry in general terms; and the third is the Oracle.

LINE 36:
wild avenging demons:
This refers to the story of Tortoise and the miraculous food drum offered him in spirit land in compensation for his palm nut that one of the spirit children has eaten. After long use (and misuse) the drum ceases to produce any more feasts when it is beaten. Whereupon Tortoise blatantly contrives a reenactment of his first visit to spirit land. But this time the spirits (fully aware, no doubt, of his greed) take him to a long row of hanging drums and allow him to pick one for himself. As you would expect, he picks the largest and lumbers away under its great weight. Home at last, he makes elaborate arrangements for a feast and then beats the drum. No food comes; instead demons armed with long whips emerge and belabor him to their satisfaction.

The element of choice is a recurrent theme in Igbo folklore, especially in man's dealings with the spirit world. We are not forced; we make a free choice.

AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, AUGUST 2004

Copyright © 1971, 1973, 2004 by Chinua Achebe

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States
by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Achebe, Chinua.
[Poems]
Collected poems / Chinua Achebe.
p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-51791-3

1. Nigeria—Poetry. I. Title.
PR9387.9.A3A17 2004
821′.914—dc22
2004040986

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