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Welcome!
REMI RAJI is the pen name of Aderemi Raji-Oyelade, Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser, and cultural activist. His first collection of poems – A harvest of laughters (1997) – has won national and international recognition. A Salzburg Fellow and visiting professor and writer to a number of institutions including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Universities of California at Riverside and Irvine, University of Cape Town, South Africa, and Cambridge University, UK, Raji’s scholarly essays have appeared in journals including Research in African Literatures and African Literature Today. He has read his poems widely in Africa, Europe and America. In 2005, he served as the Guest Writer to the City of Stockholm, Sweden. His other volumes of poetry include Webs of remembrance (2001), Shuttlesongs America: A poetic guided tour (2003), Lovesong for my wasteland (2005) and Gather my blood rivers of song (2009). Raji’s works have been translated into French, German, Catalan, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Latvian. He has been an Alexander von Humboldt Scholar to Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. He currently teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. |
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| THE HUMAN FACE IN THE HUMANITIES§ |
Preamble
The topic before us today is a very rhetorical subject, one which is in the present but with its hind limbs firmly rooted in the cove of the past; it is a topic which readily yields itself to various interpretations or interventions. The assumption clearly embedded in the topic is one that suggests that the various disciplines that form the core of humanistic studies are united in the discourse of the human condition, the nature of society, the representation of experience and the codification of civilizations. The Humanities is a broad academic term which encompasses the related disciplines of Anthropology, Classics, History, Literature, Language and Linguistics, Communication Arts, Religious Studies, Theatre Arts, Creative Arts and other disciplines which depend on the use of analytic and critical imagination for their production. Therefore, the Humanities contain the philology and philosophy of things. The earliest known philosophers in the discourse of Humanities, Plato and Aristotle, provided us with hints of the education of the human mind. In so doing, in such books as Ars Poetica, Das Republik, and Ion, we come to understand that the ethical and the aesthetic aspects of literary objects/productions are the means towards the configuration of the human face and the representation of the human mind. These two hypothetical constants form the binary basis of the interpretation, and recuperation of the experience and the expression of the human condition. The term Humanities is a relatively recent word which did not appear in the 1933 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and which was inserted only after World War II. Rather, the subjects and disciplines under the recent institutional term were originally referred to as belonging to the Liberal Arts. The closest cognates of the word human known to have been used before it include both adjectives and nouns – humane, humanist, humanity, humanitarian, and Humanism, and the verb, to humanize. To humanize means “to portray or endow with human characteristics or attributes; to make human” http://www.thefreedictionary.com/humanizeSo what do we mean by the Humanities, or what are the Humanities? According to M. H. Abrahams, the word humanist was coined in the 16th century to “signify one who taught or worked in the “studia humanitatis,”… that is, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy, as distinguished from fields less concerned with the moral and imaginative aspects and activities of man, such as mathematics, natural philosophy, and theology” (78). Humanists are scholars, thinkers and activists who produced intellectual materials meant to resolve problems, provoke the emergence of new and ideas assumed to be beneficial to man and society. Abrahams noted too that the word humanism became current in the 19th century and it was used to describe “the view of human nature, the general values, and the educational ideas common to many Renaissance humanists, as well as to later writers in the same tradition” (78). By inference, humanities, to use it as a singular term, refers to the study of man as the centre of the universe. It is the conflation of the study of man as part of, or in control of nature, as well as the study of man in the dynamic progression of culture. ( A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edition). As Marjorie Perloff suggests in “Crisis in the Humanities”: The humanities are not any one thing. They are all around us and evident in our daily lives. When you visit an exhibition on "The Many Realms of King Arthur" at your local library, that is the humanities. When you read the diary of a seventeenth-century New England midwife, that is the humanities. When you watch an episode of The Civil War, that is the humanities too. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/crisis.htmlWhen an essayist composes a thought-provoking piece about global warming and its implication for human survival, that is the humanities. In the context of our own experience, when a sermon is delivered against corruption in high and low places in our nation, that is the humanities at work; the humanities is at work in a television programme involving interaction between discussants and a coverage of audience, debating about a topical issues like drug addiction and prostitution among the youth; an informed and critical appraisal of a Nigerian home-video, a parade of masquerades performing, a night at the theatre, a poetry performance, and a critique of an arts exhibition, all of these are part of the limitless cache of what is known and understood as the humanities. To speak about the human in the humanities is to refer to a commitment to the metaphysical health of the individual, a commitment to the spiritual well-being of the community, as well as a commitment to the psychological progress of the nation. By their naming and definition, the disciplines of the Humanities offer insight into the purpose of their teaching and learning: History is the memorization of the past; Religious Studies is the codification of the laws, tenets and practice of theologies of man; Classics is the aggregation of the cultural myths and legends of particular civilizations; Philology is the study of the structure and relationships of a language or languages; Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and experience; etc… It can be said that the potential for interdisciplinary studies in the humanities is more assured and fluent because the discourse of the human is central, crucial and germane to each of the disciplines under the rubric. Even then, there have been institutional gestures about the deployment of the humanistic ideal in the operation and servicing of such a science-based discipline as medicine, so that we now talk about the need to humanise the medical practice. A discussion of the human face of the humanities will always be a tentative and as yet unending subject. Tentative because the connection between humanism and Humanities is always likely to be a relative and idealistic one. Unending because the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary connections of the major areas of the humanities create an endless set of possibilities for the theme. The human face of the humanities presupposes a focus on the humanising qualities and the humane potentials of the particular discipline. The human face of the discipline refers to the concerns for the social, political, psychological and spiritual states of the subject under scrutiny. The human face in the humanities can be framed through the three main disciplines of Literary Studies, History, and Philosophy, expressed through linguistic prisms of Language(s). The Humanities humanize, t he Humanities re-memory.In a lecture delivered at a similar programme before the students of English at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba Akoko, I tried to enlist the importance of Literature in national development, thereby asserting that the progression of civilizations, as well the memorization and celebration of the genius of a nation depends on the quality of education that a people get. The third point of the roles of literature as I composed then, will suffice here: Literature bears allegiance to the capture of great ideas, and it is in the composition of the literary text that national development is intellectualized. The writer is inventor of images; the writer is bearer of both personal and collective histories of people and nation; Literature is therefore the means for the establishment of individual and national biographies and dreams. http://www.remiraji.com/Here, I will repeat it differently that the knowledge of the humanities is a crucial decimal in the refinement of the individual who is by extension the human sign of the health of a nation or community. The Humanities codify, allowing the creation of signs, codes and strategies by which ideas, events, and do*****ents can be critically assessed. The Humanities edify; the humanities celebrate achievements of mortals in immortal ways, or by timeless means such that the Horatian dictum "life is short, art is long" becomes an actual and literal statement. The Humanities civilize. The Humanities are exegetical, offering systematic insight into the procedures for the interpretation of literary, historical, and philosophical texts. Bearers of the human faceIn the cognate connection and the cognitive insight of the term, we thus refer to the activity of the contemplative poet, the sensitive historian, the speculative philosophers: these are the timeless bearers of the human face, they are the wearers of the human mask in the humanities. When Wole Soyinka noted in his prison memoir The Man Died, that the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny, he was striking a blow against inhumanity and foregrounding the classical human face in the humanities. §Being text of a lecture presented at the maiden edition of the NASELS Week, organised by students of the Department of English, Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo. June 15, 2010.
In the cognate connection and the cognitive insight of the term, we thus refer to the activity of the contemplative poet, the sensitive historian, the speculative philosophers: these are the timeless bearers of the human face, they are the wearers of the human mask in the humanities. When Wole Soyinka noted in his prison memoir , that the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny, he was striking a blow against inhumanity and foregrounding the classical human face in the humanities. , offering systematic insight into the procedures for the interpretation of literary, historical, and philosophical texts.In the cognate connection and the cognitive insight of the term, we thus refer to the activity of the contemplative poet, the sensitive historian, the speculative philosophers: these are the timeless bearers of the human face, they are the wearers of the human mask in the humanities. When Wole Soyinka noted in his prison memoir , that the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny, he was striking a blow against inhumanity and foregrounding the classical human face in the humanities. the humanities celebrate achievements of mortals in immortal ways, or by timeless means such that the Horatian dictum "life is short, art is long" becomes an actual and literal statement., offering systematic insight into the procedures for the interpretation of literary, historical, and philosophical texts.In the cognate connection and the cognitive insight of the term, we thus refer to the activity of the contemplative poet, the sensitive historian, the speculative philosophers: these are the timeless bearers of the human face, they are the wearers of the human mask in the humanities. When Wole Soyinka noted in his prison memoir , that the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny, he was striking a blow against inhumanity and foregrounding the classical human face in the humanities. , allowing the creation of signs, codes and strategies by which ideas, events, and do*****ents can be critically assessed. the humanities celebrate achievements of mortals in immortal ways, or by timeless means such that the Horatian dictum "life is short, art is long" becomes an actual and literal statement., offering systematic insight into the procedures for the interpretation of literary, historical, and philosophical texts.In the cognate connection and the cognitive insight of the term, we thus refer to the activity of the contemplative poet, the sensitive historian, the speculative philosophers: these are the timeless bearers of the human face, they are the wearers of the human mask in the humanities. When Wole Soyinka noted in his prison memoir , that the man dies in him who keeps silent in the face of tyranny, he was striking a blow against inhumanity and foregrounding the classical human face in the humanities. tIn a lecture delivered at a similar programme before the students of English at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba Akoko, I tried to enlist the importance of Literature in national development, thereby asserting that the progression of civilizations, as well the memorization and celebration of the genius of a nation depends on the quality of education that a people get. The third point of the roles of literature as I composed then, will suffice here:
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Posted by remraj1 - Thursday, August 26 @ 23:35:40 BST
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| Notes des de la forja de la meva ment§ |
XII Festival de poesia de la Mediterrània, Palma de Mallorca (31 de maig – 3 de juny de 2010)
El meu aprenentatge i el meu tracte i amb la poesia escrita (en llengua anglesa) es va convertir en alguna cosa més que una simple trobada puntual i casual tan aviat com vaig començar a llegir els romàntics anglesos a l'escola secundària, i gairebé tan aviat com vaig entrar al famós Club de Poesia de la Universitat d'Ibadan, a principis dels anys vuitanta. Abans d'això, havia escoltat i mamat la poesia tradicional del meu poble, el ioruba, durant la primera dècada en què el meu país es va independitzar de la Gran Bretanya. Passava els dies entre ruixats de cants –cants de dol i de celebració–. Vivia en una comunitat on els laments i les rialles entrellacen les seves notes amb la coreografia de les veus. Les cançons de les ploraneres, les cançons de les núvies, les cançons gremials dels caçadors, les cançons de mascarades, així com els cants religiosos, les cançons socials per acompanyar els naixements, les imposicions de nom i les morts, les lloances del llinatge, que s'han d'aprendre de memòria..., totes m'han amarat la imaginació des dels meus anys de formació. Les he begudes totes. En la meva llengua, una simple salutació pot alliberar un banc de metàfores. Vaig començar a jugar amb les paraules ben aviat, a nodrir-me de les entranyes i l'ou de la paraula. Em vaig fer cantant per inclinació natural i pel llegat, i va ser molt abans que comencés a encomanar els meus versos a la memòria blanca del paper, i abans que aprengués com amagar poesia a la butxaca de l'ordinador personal.
La poesia em va trobar, a l'edat oportuna, al lloc oportú; i a l'hora propícia, vaig unir-me al seguici dels escriptors africans que han de desplegar la paraula per parlar de la condició i l'existència de l'home al continent. Romànticament lligat a aquesta idea, suposava que les paraules poden forçar canvis; estava convençut que la poesia ofereix un espai per interrogar, conquerir i confessar, tot en un. Criat amb el cavall de la paraula, vull muntar les ales de la poesia per ser capaç de dir les coses com no s'han dit. Vull dir i veure les coses d'una altra forma per tal de desafiar i provocar visions més pregones de les qüestions i els moments comuns i coneguts. I segueixo creient, això sí, que la poesia pot fer una nació.
Remi Raji
§Catalan translation of “Notes from the forge of my mind” (Annie Bats).
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Posted by remraj1 - Thursday, June 03 @ 21:21:08 BST
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| Notes from the forge of my mind |
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At the XII Mediterranean Poetry Festival, Palma de Mallorca, May 31- June 3, 2010.
My acquaintanceship with and apprenticeship of written poetry (using the English language) would become more than mere incidental encounter as soon as I started reading the English Romantics in secondary school, and almost as soon as I joined the famous Poetry Club at the University of Ibadan, in the early 1980s. Prior to that, I had listened to and imbibed aspects of the traditional poetry of my ethnic Yoruba nation in the first decade that my country attained independence from Great Britain. I lived my days in the showers of songs, dirgeful and celebratory songs. I lived in a community where lamentations and laughters have their notes laced in the choreography of voices. The songs of women wailers; the songs of the new bride; the guild songs of hunters; the chants of masquerades; as well as the religious songs, the social songs of births, naming, and of deaths, the praisesongs of the lineage, which had to be learned by rote, … all of these are stapled to the imagination in my formative years. I drank them all. The simple greeting in my language can launch a shoal of metaphors. I started early to play with words, to prey upon the entrails and the egg of the word. I became a singer by natural inclination and heritage, that was long before I started to commit my lines to the white memory of the paper, and before I learned how to hide poetry in the pouch of the personal computer.
Poetry found me, at the right age, in the right place; and in the auspicious hour, I joined the train of African writers who must deploy the word to make statements about the condition and existence of man on the continent. Romantically tied to the idea, I assumed that words can force change; I was convinced that Poetry offers the space to query, conquer and confess, all at once. Weaned on the horse of speech, I want to ride on the wings of Poetry to be able to say things in extraordinary ways. I want to say and see things differently in order to challenge and provoke further visions of familiar issues and moments. Still, I believe that poetry can make a nation.
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Posted by remraj1 - Thursday, June 03 @ 21:03:48 BST
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| Toyin Akinosho at Fifty: Salute to Enigma |
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And then suddenly, he turned fifty. True to his type of
life, the man is so unassuming. He is the one who fits the cliché perfectly - a
bundle of talents.
His name was frequently on the lips of the late poet and friend, Sesan Ajayi.
It was Ajayi's desire that I should meet with this man called Toyin, around the
late 1980s. Sesan Ajayi wouldn't stop telling me that if there was someone who
could define our generation of writers well, someone who knew enough about how
to define and describe the literary tradition, in spite of his grounding in the
applied science of Geology, the one who was devoted to the industry of our
literature,...that man was Toyin Akinosho. I had heard so much about Toyin for
the curiosity to last and nudge soon after the demise of Sesan, himself a great
organiser of literary events and a defining voice of the emerging group of
writers in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
If a book - a novel, collection of poems, memoir, or book of essays - was
declared as unavailable, Toyin was sure to have it in his massive library. If New
York Review of Books, South African Review of Books or TLS
announced the publication of a new title, don't guess who to ask to give a sniper
commentary on it at short notice. Toyin was, and is still dependable as a
literary connoisseur.
When we finally met, I think in 1994, in company of Odia Ofeimun, I wasn't
disappointed, and regretted not following Sesan Ajayi in one of his trips to
Lagos, via Ago-Iwoye, to find this enigma of a man, a fine and committed man of
ideas, one of the truly dedicated men of my generation, dedicated to the fine
art of reporting, publishing, peddling, packaging, and doing literature in the
service, not of self-promotion, but in the loftier service of cultural revival
and regeneration. It was Toyin who first described me as a cultural activist,
but I wonder what he is if I am so described.
In Nigeria, and Lagos of the 90s, it
wasn't easy to work full-time in a big corporation which demanded promptitude,
and equally manage time to do things literary, through the graphic intrigues
and strange orderliness of the city. It wasn't easy to dip the working hand in
so many projects and come out unscathed, all fingers intact. Toyin did, and is
still doing so. I am not sure, but I think he has a couple of pseudonyms under
which he prosecutes the business. Alfred Akanni/Akanji is one.
I hear that this young man has retired from corporation work, which means that
he will now have 27 hours a day to do the cultural and literary work, bringing
the intelligence of his training and experience in tow.
Toyin, I am lucky to have heard about you, and to have met you eventually, even
if a little bit late. You are the legacy of our Talented Tenth, the genuine
spirit of our literary renaissance, and indeed, you are the shining example of
our irrepressible lot.
Happy Birthday, Publisher.
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Posted by remraj1 - Thursday, May 13 @ 04:46:17 BST
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| WM 2006: the fever and the poetry of Soccer |
In Germany, the World Cup championship is known as Weltmeister, “WM 2006”, for short.
There is no end to celebrations in the city of soccer, and you don’t know if your neighbour got soul and voice until his team scores a goal. You never know how people really scream, laugh, cry, swoon or just go mad yelling beyond redemption, until the angled ball shakes the net in the decisive hour. It is only on a soccer-crazy night that hooting is just so common in the streets that you wonder when people suddenly realised that their cars are fitted with horns. They pump their emotion through the city, singing and shouting through the night even when the game has long been played in other cities, away from the bubbly capital. Now a car that doesn’t carry a flag the size of my mother’s wrapper is indeed a strange sight in Berlin. And I guess it is so in Dortmund, Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Leipzig, Stuttgart, and Hannover, all over Deutschland. The fever is touchable and as yet, incurable. Witness a memorable advert by Mastercard, on a robotic mobile board: “Football fever. Priceless. Accepted all over Germany”. There is no more graphic way to describe it. The collective hysteria is very much like the poet’s private joy in finding the right metaphor to frame an idea or event. Soccer is poetry, and poetry soccer, the loosening of emotion and the strange passion which unties or solidifies differences… In Berlin, since Germany beat Costa Rica 4-2 on June 9, 2006, the average temperature has been 24 degrees Celsius! The weather is bright, because the smell in the air is the round leather taste of soccerdom. There is a new real spring in the eye of the ordinary Berliner; and the touring soccer fans especially who pay so much to be where the action is, rejoice in the magic of the moment. Although Berlin is only going to host only six matches out of the total 64 games (with the finals coming up at the historic Olympiadstadion on July 9), the city is the Big Bowl of the Beautiful game, the hemisphere of fulltime entertainment wherever the adventure is possible. Alexanderplatz, the busiest public transport centre has one of the rare architectural totems of the city, that is the “Fernsehturm” (the TV Tower) of dizzying heights and which turns the full circle of 360 degrees so that the touristy eye can take in the grandeur of the Berliner space. The Fernsehturm, shaped like a full size ball, a globe standing on top of huge shuttle of metallic cylinder, is now painted to look exactly like a huge football in flight…And there is also the 100 x 1 life-size football which sits pretty close to the Reichstag (the Parliament) and which overlooks the Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor). In front of this historic structure is the largest outdoor television screen measuring 60 square meters, apart from other big screen points on the stretch of the “June 17 Street” now renamed the “Fan Mile” for soccerphiles. The Olympiadstadion (Olympic Stadium), recently modernised with a cost of 242 million euros, will contain 74,000 spectators soaked in the multi-dimensional and cinematic atmosphere of the arena. If the match is drab, the colourful venue will make up for a good memory. Yet very few people will remember that this was the place where Adolf Hitler refused to shake hands with Jesse Owens, the African American winner of four gold medals at the Olympic games of 1936… There are other remarkable installations to prove the artness, technical beauty, and the sense of memory which soccer shares with poetry in this instance. There is the most futuristic section of Berlin called Potsdamerplatz with its huge glass houses, hi-tech shops, modernised museums, cinema domes, and Big Screen Square, all of which make life look like an unending festival, with a price tag by the way. A section of the urban rail station at Potsdamerplatz is now named after Edson Arantes dos Nascimento, simply called Pelé, the Brazilian, the only player to have won three World Cups, and UNICEF’s Athlete of the Century. “Peléstation” is the world premiere exhibition of the story of the legend as never told before with the aid of photographs, newly edited and restored videos, and a museum of mementoes, jerseys, boots and personal belongings of the player chosen by himself, for significant reasons, including the ball with which he scored his 1000th goal in 1969. Modern technology conquers all, as with the extra exhibition of “Fussball in Dunkeln” (Football in the Dark) in which children are made to experience the new Brazilian craze of playing in the dark, perhaps one of the mysteries of the South American genius revealed. And yes, there is the recently opened Hauptbahnhof (the City’s Central train station), the most expensive and largest station in Europe; shaped like a dome and from afar it reminds you of a football, the colour of silver, volleyed into space. As noted, the “June 17 Street” is now a large football pitch with only spectators 24 hours of the day, drinking and drowning in the euphoria, with a thousand cameras of different purposes fixed on the magical and joyful scenes… But there is always a price to pay for drunkenness and acts of hooliganism: the silver and green coloured “Polizei” is always around the corner keeping the order, or trying to keep it. The common economy thrives on the serenade of soccer. Soaps, ice cream, perfume bottles, chocolates, radio sets, bread, and cakes, not to talk of meatballs, all are now made into football shapes with colours for effect by corporate and retailer industries. Oh well, while some scream their heads off, sing in victory and cry in defeat, there are others who derive and dream out riches from the passion. Of course, the mega-economic status of the Big game as Big Business is therefore not lost to the euphoria. By the way, the hotel that doesn’t fly the flags of the footballing nations, or the restaurant that does not have a 21x17 TV in the strategic place cannot be seen as up-to-date and chic. Half of youthful Berlin now wears one team’s jersey or the other; half of it doesn’t wear anything at all, perhaps because the sun is too naked and it is better to show off the national colours of the favourite team on the naked body. Life-size tattoos now have new definitive descriptions on the human body: if you walk the streets, it would not be long before you notice a model in G-string, covered in the national team’s colours, ready to pose with flag-waving fans. The round leather patriotism is the name of the new religion, and fashion. After watching the pulsating match between Germany and Poland the other night, I changed my mind: the host may get to the semi-finals after all, or the joys of soccering may be short-lived. They better get there. The fervor to win is so tangible. I saw Dr. Angela Merkel sighing at those misses, and when eventually the god of soccer smiled on the host team on the 90th minute, with a symbolic combination between the winger David Odonkor and striker Oliver Neuville, I could swear she would have announced a holiday thereafter, if she were an African despot. The significance of that German goal might be lost to those who do not see through the dynamics of a changing society. As it was, to be German is to be deep-skin white, into the blood. Odonkor (or Asamoah for that matter), does not look white to me, and that June 14th goal is going to be significant for theorists of nationalism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. It is also significant that the player was chosen first to be interviewed on national television ahead of others in the team. As for those who dislike football or who are indifferent to the game of soccer, the soccerphobes, this is the most uncertain time to be in Berlin. They push it in your face, they choke it down your unwilling throat: like it, or love it. Only that at nights, the noise gets too dangerous and unbearable, moving sometimes from mere nationalist outbursts to racist slurs. Yet the anti-racist mission of the soccer federation is not in doubt, and “Kaiser” Franz Beckenbauer’s ability as the leader of the Local Organising committee of “WM 2006” is there for the world to see… After over twenty matches, the world knows now that there are no dangerously superb teams as there are no mercilessly weak ones. Except only for the effortless defeat of the Ukrainians in the hands of the Spanish team, and the 6-0 routing of Serbia & Montenegro by Argentina, all the other matches showed the level of the advancement of Soccer as a game of technique, team work, creativity and endurance (the same qualities which earned Pele the honour of the total athlete) worldwide. The four African teams of Angola, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo lost in their opening matches but so narrowly that a condescending commentator noted that the only problem with those African teams is lack of discipline. I wonder if that wasn’t a ready-made script to be delivered at the next available opportunity. And of course, Trinidad & Tobago surprised us all: beautiful on the ball and enduring almost to the end, before they finally fell 0-2 to the average prowess of David Beckham’s England. The most successful underrated team so far is Ecuador, winning the full six points like Germany, England and Argentina. And talking about the fever of celebration, who did not see the Spiderman face-mask display of Ivan Kaviedes, scorer of Ecuador’s third goal against Costa Rica? While the Fever lasts, as I asked a friend, how do you imagine a “worldwithoutfootball” and still hope to survive a month and a day of soccer in the beautiful city? My friend’s mother supports Spain and claims that Brazil is a disappointment this year. I said to her, it is too early in the tournament, until July 9, at Berlin’s Olympiadstadion. And it will be Brazil against the last unfortunate team! Well I missed my team’s opener against Croatia (on June 13) because another Poetry came to the City. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka was in the country to accept another literary achievement award, this time from a remarkable group of high school students in Berlin. I had planned only to meet with Bankole Olayebi (publisher of my “Lovesong…”) who gracefully offered the surprise, at the last minute, that Prof. is around in person, some train stations from my present abode. 90 minutes of unscheduled dinner and quality talk with WS (and our publisher) is worth the whole of a Brazilian game although, I confess, I glanced sideways once to catch the replay of the only decider of the game. There is a limit to what football can take away from a man’s other passion. Finally, the more predictable guess: the fever will be over; FIFA’s prized trophy will be taken; a new history will be written; win or lose, the host nation will count the gains of new businesses; Soccer Incorporation will continue the continental trade-off of players as objects (the traffic of which is very predictable) across the globe, until another season comes. The season of migration to Nelson Mandela country, in 2010. Written while in residence as an Alexander von Humboldt scholar at Humboldt University, Berlin (2006-07).
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Posted by remraj1 - Thursday, May 06 @ 09:48:13 BST
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