Everything Here
As always, I come to you today with a problem: a crisis of thought, the long-term utility of embracing one’s passion on the one hand and the gnawing need for financial independence on the other. We have discussed both extensively enough to allow for a nuanced understanding.
We have had a drought for two years. I do not know about anywhere else, but southern Zimbabwe has held long patches of brown in December. Patches of brown where there should be maize fields. Patches of brown where the cattle should have been grazing. Patches of brown where entire rivers flowed not too long ago. Patches of brown where there should have been life.
Most importantly, I hate poetry for teaching me how to love. Poetry made a lover out of me. Before poetry, I didn’t know that the gaze from my lover’s eyes could loosen my joints. I didn’t know that a single touch of his hands could melt me like candle wax. . .
Child-trafficking and child-labour are criminal and unjust. Sadly, many young girls who have been reduced to maids serving in homes in cities in Nigeria are daily abused, assaulted, raped and denied tasting the honey of knowledge. Dozens of such poor girls are yearning to have a better life and future, like the children they are paid peanuts to wash panties for or serve as nannies.
I still sit in absolute darkness. A voice. A soulful voice which becomes a place of shelter, a resort: A voice to heal the wounds of darkness and to chase the ghosts. The three artists speak out images of the past, sitting on the floor when light slowly guides us out of the darkness, their voices put the memories in place.
Thus, it is surmisable that whoever will contemplate the past eternity during which the world was not in existence and the future eternity during which it will not exist, will see that it is like a journey, in which the stages represented by years, the leagues by months, the miles by days and the steps by moments.
Harry Garuba (1958-2020), internationally acclaimed Nigerian scholar, poet, journalist, editor, anthologist and theorist.
I still sit in absolute darkness. A voice. A soulful voice which becomes a place of shelter, a resort: A voice to heal the wounds of darkness and to chase the ghosts. The three artists speak out images of the past, sitting on the floor when light slowly guides us out of the darkness, their voices put the memories in place.
