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RHYTHM WEDNESDAYS:
REFLECTIONS ON THE ANTHILL DAYS AT NSUKKA.
By Nnorom
Azuonye
1.
Many nights these
days, after I have put the kids to bed, and kissed
my wife goodnight, I return to the computer
workstation to either try to write, or do some other
work and find that I tend to drift away for short
crawls through vast grounds of my memory, exhuming
to my welcome surprise, many enchanting moments made
exceptional by many charming people I have had the
privilege of meeting.
Recently, Gbubemi
Amas has put up some pictures and information on
Facebook. Apparently he has been involved in a film
production in Ireland with Kalu Ikeagwu who is now
better known as a Nollywood actor. In 1989, Ikeagwu
and Obi Emelonye took turns to play R.I.P in Esiaba
Irobi’s Hangmen Also Die. Seeing good old Amas still
doing the art thing was very nice indeed and I went
through my files in search of Rhythm Wednesdays:
Reflections on the Anthill Days at Nsukka. I wrote
this piece in 2003 when Ike Anya and Unoma Azuah
planned to publish a book - Umu Nsukka: The Children
of Nsukka – a celebration of the university town
with stories, memoirs, poetry etc. For some reason,
I failed or forgot to send it to the editors.
Reading it again in 2009 has made me laugh, and it
has made me pause to cherish a man like Gbubemi Amas
for his part in building and running the Anthill at
Nsukka.
2.
I drank Gulder
straight from a sweating brown bottle in my room. It
was a nice room in the Boys’ Quarters at 606 Odim
Street, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. 606 Odim
Street was the residence at the time of my eldest
brother Chukwuma. In 1987, Chukwuma was a lecturer
at the university’s Department of Linguistics and
Nigerian Languages. As I enjoyed the lager, Chike,
my other brother, sat at the desk in a corner of my
room. Drinking his Maltina slowly, he read my poems
as they emerged from my Brother electronic
typewriter, which worked off a bunch of batteries as
there was power failure at the time. Chike had, only
months earlier, graduated from the university’s
Department of Fine and Applied Arts, and was a Youth
Corper at Enugu. A part-time poet himself, Chike
seemed to enjoy my work, mostly sonnets – I was
obsessed with sonnets in those days. He was quite
unsparing in his critiques, and I took it all in
good faith.
“Do you go to
Anthill?” Chike suddenly asked.
I laughed. I
laughed because Anthill meant nothing to me.
Frankly, I thought he was being facetious. What
would I be going to an anthill for? Was I an ant? My
mind was cast back to a conversation I had years
earlier with my late brother, Chidi. It was about
ahu - a melon cake popular among the Isuikwuato
people. Some people call is Egusi or Egwusi
akpuruakpu. The crux of the joke being that one day,
Nne Chukwuma; my mother had bought some ahu from Aho
Nta Market at Eluama, and after eating one of those
delicious cakes, I had shouted out at Chidi, who was
liberating himself in the toilet, “Hey Chidi i
ga-ata ahu?” Meaning literally, will you chew (eat)
ahu? Incidentally, ‘ita ahu’ also means to lose
weight. It was hilarious, honestly. Chidi did not
know that Nne Chukwuma had bought some ahu, and he
thought I was asking if he would lose weight.
Probably annoyed, he shouted at me, “Takwaa ahu”
that is, you lose weight yourself.
After we had both
laughed ourselves silly, Chike explained to me that
The Anthill was a music and poetry club with poetry
readings and live music every Wednesday.
Incidentally that day was a Wednesday, and he took
me to The Anthill in the evening.
3.
The experience
was surreal. As we walked through the gate, the
smell of suya slapped me around as if I were a
naughty boy, but pleasantly so. I swallowed buckets
of saliva and wanted some straightaway, but Chike
thought we might get some later. We went inside
where I met this guy called Mike Adiele. Mike was an
eager kind of fellow that managed to come across
both as welcoming and very busy. You know he could
but could not spare a minute. Chike introduced me to
Mike and the first thing Mike asked as he thrust his
hand at me for a brisk shake was what I fed my
beards. I had a full bush at the time. Funny guy,
Mike, he had some one-liners that I remember till
this day. After introducing me to Mike, I met a few
other people that evening. There was this small chap
with budding locks that everybody seemed to respect,
he shook Chike’s hand, and Chike said to him, “Olu,
this is my brother, Nnorom. He is in the theatre
arts department.” Olu shook my hand, somewhat
perfunctorily, I felt, and mouthed something like
‘see you around’ and walked on. Then I met Big
George but Big George was in a bit of a hurry; he
was going right up to play the guitar. I sat down
and listened to Big George and then Mike Adiele
began to introduce the different poets. They got up,
stood in front of the small seated audience in the
intimate room with nets suspended from the ceiling.
The poets read their poems and got applauded and
they sat down. Up till that point, there was nothing
performative about the poetry. The people just stood
there and read their lines off pieces of papers.
Then this light-skinned guy stepped up, sat down
with a guitar and sang what came across like a cross
between jazz and soul. I recall thinking, Damn! His
voice sounds like silk rubbing against a black man’s
hair.’
“That’s Amas
Grill,” Chike said.
“With a voice
like that, why isn’t he recording albums?” I asked.
“He does,” Chike
said, “I think he has made one or two albums.
Actually I think his album is called Grill”
“Didn’t you say
his name was Amas Grill”
“That’s what he
is generally called.”
Later that
evening, after Suya and beer, I met Amas and told
him what I felt about his singing, and promised to
read some of my own poems next Wednesday.
For the next two
years, I read at the Anthill virtually every
Wednesday except on the Wednesdays I had rehearsals
that clashed, or if I was out of town. I had some
amazing experiences when I heard poets like Olu
Oguibe, Esiaba Irobi and one Okigbo guy. I forget
his first name now, but there was a rumour he was
related in some way to the late Christopher Okigbo.
I recall a certain businesslike purity in Oguibe’s
readings, a theatricality in Irobi’s readings, a
take this punch in your face style in that Okigbo
guy’s readings. Eni-Jones Umuko knocked me silly
with his poems in Pidgin English. Wednesdays were
mad.
The Anthill also
played host to Tunde Fatunde and Uche Nduka. It was
a big deal when guest poets came and it was I think
during the visit of Uche Nduka that I came in
contact with an Association of Nigerian Authors
publication, I forget which one now, but I read
things there by some Nigerian poets in the
Lagos/Ibadan axis that I had never heard about,
including the late Izzia Ahmad. I remember then
thinking that one day I might read and discuss
poetry alongside some of those people in Lagos,
London or New York. I was dreaming, even then.
4.
I had some
successful readings myself, such as “Save Your
Roses” (1988) – an 80-line dialogue poem between
lovers in the twilight of their romance. I had
written it as requiem to one of my own relationships
that had just ended. Uzoamaka Nnaemeka-Agu, my
classmate and daughter of a Supreme Court judge, who
is now a lawyer herself, was happy to play the
female voice. It is funny, that fifteen years later,
I can recall her voice rip through the night:
“…then Juliet
drank the cup of fools.”
To which I
barked:
“…and Romeo was a
greater fool.”
I would give
anything to find the script of that poem. It
probably is in the suitcase in my cousin Nkechi
Nwosu-Igbo Edochie’s house in Lagos, or in a Ghana
Must Go bag of books and papers I left at my brother
Ndubuisi’s house at Aba many many years ago. Save
Your Roses was also included in Random Whispers, my
unplublished collection that contained most of the
poems I read at the Anthill and at the Cultural
Centre Board, Calabar. I gave a copy of that
collection to Dr Ada Ugah in 1991 for comments, but
never retrieved it after youth service. Dr Ugah and
I discussed my poetry after I played the Seer in the
stage adaptation of his Novel in Verse – Colours of
the Rainbow. I later lost my other copy in London
during one of my moves from one accommodation to the
other. I had bound only two copies of the
collection. Hopefully, when I retrieve my luggage
scattered in Aba, Kaduna and Lagos following my 1997
journey to the United Kingdom, I might find lose
copies of the poems. The ones I read at the Anthill
will always hold a special meaning to me.
Have I painted a
picture of total Anthill bliss? Yes, Anthill was
great, but I had a disaster which I still remember
with a lot of shame. No I am not ashamed of it now,
but for some reason I remember exactly how ashamed I
had been that night. You see, although I always went
to the Anthill with the scripts of my poems, I never
ever read from the scripts – except for a handful of
poems I wrote in Igbo language which I was unable to
memorise. One great evening, I was presenting the
poem “What Future Are We Talking About?” and could
not get past the first few lines. It was a complete
disaster as I went on like a scratched record:
The clouds are
heavy with rain
Harrowing hints
of hate
Rage like burning
weights
On the wings of
my dreams
I forgot the rest
of the lines. I began again:
The clouds are
heavy with rain
Harrowing hints
of hate
Rage like burning
weights
On the wings of
my dreams
I forgot the
lines again. At this time Eni-Jones Umuko and Olu
Oguibe sitting in the front row urged me to read
from the script. I said no with my eyes, and in the
third attempt I remembered the lines and redeemed
myself somewhat.
That experience
that showed me that my memory was not infallible
made me more sensitive to my work as an actor in the
following years. It also meant that no matter how
many times I rehearsed my lines and got on stage, I
always made an allowance for my memory to fail me.
Thankfully though, through the plays “A Dance of The
Forests”, “Once Upon Four Robbers”, “The Slave
Wife”, “Kinjeketile”, “Who’s Afraid of Solarin”,
“Scars That Mar” and “Hangmen Also Die” among
several other plays, I only had a memory hiccup in
one play, Emeka Nwabueze’s “Guardian of The Cosmos.”
It is also the only play I have been in that I do
not recall lines from.
As suddenly as
the Anthill was introduced to me, it also simply
went off the map. I seem to recall that I spent more
time on the road in 1989/90 for theatre activities
that for a four-month period or so I just did not go
to the Anthill, then one Wednesday I went there and
it was shut.
I grieved for the
loss of what I fondly called Rhythm Wednesdays. I
missed my friends such as Ifeyinwa Egemonye who sang
a few times there. Goodness, Ifeyinwa was beautiful
and sang very well too. I recall that one night I
was reading a poem and she sat in the audience
eyeballing and distracting me. I remembered Oscar
Wilde’s statement that the best way to get rid of a
temptation is to yield to it, so then, I made an
impromptu poem to her right there:
Lamp
(for Ifeyinwa
Egemonye)
When such a
bright face
In the dim light
I see
The claws of love
the tigress
Dig deep into the
dark of my world
To bring out the
light of my life.
Later that
evening I wrote it down for her on a piece of paper
and it remains unedited to this day. I walked her
and Ifeoma Meka, her room mate back to Okpara Hall.
The two girls smoked like locomotive engines, and
since at the time I also enjoyed a stick or two of
cancer everyday, I didn’t mind too much. I also
remember the singing partners Obi Emelonye and C.J.
(I am sorry and ashamed that I do not remember C.J’s
full name.) Considering how many meals, and drinks I
enjoyed with CJ, how many times I visited him, he
visited me, or we visited Emeka Uba together, or the
parties we attended together, I never got to know
C.J’s full name. I remember other Anthill greats
like Obiora Udechukwu and Emman Usman Shehu.
5.
I remember the
Rhythm Wednesdays of Anthill with a hopeful sadness,
like unfinished business of school sweethearts that
drift apart when their parents move to other towns
leaving no forwarding addresses. Such sweethearts
hold on to the memory of their love, young,
uncorrupted, unconditional, unsmothering,
unquestioning, loving others the best they could,
yet trusting that life could not be so unkind to
keep them apart forever. I have always hoped that
someday, while I am yet able to read a poem, Anthill
shall rise again, the rays of her songs’ sunshine
undimmed.
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