OUR point of departure for this week’s column is a slender volume of verse called ‘A Decade in Poetry’ produced and edited by Frank Chipasula and published in 1991, courtesy of Kenneth Kaunda Foundation.
It is a contribution to a collection of locally composed verse by a number of poets including academicians and people of varied persuasions in life. It is not clear what prompted the production in the first place but it is laudable that at least we have something to muse about in our artistry pursuits.
At the end of the anthology there are short notes about the contributors and for our purposes we focus on a distinguished academician, Lyson Tembo, who at the time of the publication was heading a research department in the curriculum development at the University of Zambia. Lyson, for all purposes and intents, is what the late Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, would refer to as a ‘been-to’ with educational spells in News Land and the United States of America and obviously much more to date as we take a critical analysis of his work.
He is the kind of person we might want to believe belongs to a pariah literati, specialists that went global trotting in search of western education and on return to the villages of their birth—if ever they’d dare to—were considered as people of two worlds, a dichotomy of sorts, a synthesis of tradition and modernity. At their point of return they are not so sure where they belong; they are mere exiles:
The return is tedious
And the exiled souls gather on the beach
Arguing and deciding their future
Should they return home
And face the fences the termites had eaten
And see the dunghill that has
Mounted on their birth place?
In his lyric poem, “To my Mother,” Lyson or ‘speaker’ carries within his desperate soul this anguish of a confused returnee unaware what he is because of where he has been. He is not sure whether his mother whom he still holds dearly to his heart would figure out his identity because of a blurred vision over time and what I might call the cultural ‘other- synthesis.’ To wit:
(Mother…)
You might entirely see
Me in a cloud of smoke.
It must smart your eyes
To penetrate the screen
To see me as I am
And to leave me again
As I am not, in disbelief.
The pariah literati has hopped and hopped from one metropolitan city of the world  to another and entered monstrous library towers of the world to drink at the deep wells of knowledge and his own head swollen to the full and as the speaker conjures up his image; he speaks English with utter fluency—a great achievement indeed! He has obviously earned a great deal of cultural foreignness so much so that his own mother would hardly recognize him.
I can speak a foreign language
Which I can write
With fluency presence,
I must have become like
A spider to estrange you from me
In the cobwebs of a new-fangled
Confusion called education.
You must say that I have
Changed, that I am not what I was
That I was not what I am
Apparently, one might not need to travel abroad to speak and write English fluently albeit with a given ‘pretense.’ All that one needs is to spend time in a cold concrete class room and sit long undisturbed hours at a desk to come out of it perfectly refined and speak English with a contorted face taking careful attention to stress syllables rightly to  become more accomplished than the Queen of England herself.
I remember a trip I made to the United States of America with a colleague several years ago where at dinner upon being asked; both of us to pray in our own tongues my friend confessed he could not and failed deplorably! — looking back, I think our guests should have given him a standing ovation in their hearts for such an awesome achievement; and a toast to their celebrated descendants for bringing civilisation to the dark continent of Africa!
It would appear to me that although the speaker is so concerned about his mother’s alienation one would think he is more at a loss in this cobweb of cultural imperialism. This poem is a good structural piece of work; Lyson handles it so well and helps to build it up until it reaches a counter-point where equilibrium is created; a kind of marriage of two cultures where mother and son can now loosen their tongues and talk ‘each to each.’
After all, her son’s roots and ethical symbols of belonging all rest beneath the black soil of the village of his birth under a‘msolo’ tree as a point of reference to a long standing tradition of attachment.
We must be what we are mother,
Life is not a perpetual absurdity.
Through a spiritual life-line
Defying the pinpoint of
An intellectual definition
We are conjoined in an
Inviolable bond each to each
The black soil opens to the navel:
The umbilical cord you buried
Under the Msolo tree
In his story –telling technique and exquisite imagery, Lyson ties up his subtle poem in a fine bundle with a moral about mutual love binding mother and son together; one also sees a broader application to this synthesis.
The speaker talks about a tree and its leaves which fall to the ground during the hot season but sprout again to continue the life-long process of its existence. Family life, the speaker, concludes is a tree which should always seek its renewal generation after generation.
In a number of ways this is a good poem with stanza- breaks all tied together. Lyson’s lyric style is unassuming, simple and calculated with the structure and form disintegrating before the reader’s eyes to drain off its meaning.
The reader will notice how Lyson’s lines are enjambed and pieced together line- to- line in an amorphous journey to the end of the poem. The verse ends with a finality that cannot be questioned:
Look at the trees mother:
As it is hot, and the heavens tearless,
Those leaves fall in a lifeless flutter.
And consider the leaves:
Those dry withered leaves we see,
Like the veins of our withered hearts
Need sustenance from a family tree
Dear reader, this is yet another wonderful poem with a lot of lessons for our current poetry criticism. In the last stanza the poet uses words in an intelligent web of images.
Consider the following, for instance, ‘heavens tearless,’ lifeless flutter,’ and ‘withered hearts.’ Would you try to guess what he is up to and do you think he just quickly sat down and began to write without thinking about what he wanted to do? He then uses what is called in literature as ‘simile’ when he says, ‘like the veins of our withered hearts’ in reference, of course, to ‘the dry withered leaves.’ Any guess about its meaning?
Do you see any other intelligent ways of using words and images in the rest of the poem including the first stanza we started our discussion with?
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