On my recent trip to Orkney to pay my respects to George Mackay Brown on the centenary of his birth, I was given both a warm welcome and a grand send-off. A visiting photographer took the same bus as me from Kirkwall airport, and we quickly established a great rapport. He’d never heard of George Mackay Brown but liked what I could tell of him. And then the taxi-driver who took me from my B&B in Kirkwall back to the airport was from Stromness and knew George personally, describing him in very flattering terms. He was touched at my effort. He could barely believe the passing of time and that George would have been 100 years old. I choked up as I told him of my recent bereavement (the death of my wife, Ann Bilde, last October), and he commiserated in a very tender tone and put his hand on my shoulder. It was like a blessing from the poet himself.
I spent three nights in the Ferry Inn in Stromness.
I’m pretty sure this inn is the setting for GMB’s short story, “The Wheel”, in A Calendar of Love.
I went along to his flat on several occasions.
It’s just across from the Stromness Museum.
I bought the three anthologies published this year at Stromness Books & Prints:
I visited George Mackay Brown’s grave on his birthday. Quite a walk, but I was lucky with the weather. From Alfred Street climb up Hellihole Road and carry on along Outertown Road for about a mile. Just after a postbox there’s a sign to Warbeth Beach. Warbeth Kirkyard lies down by the water in a beautiful setting, where the hills of Hoy – an island that was very important to George – cup the departed.
GMB is buried beside his parents at the start of the twelfth row on the left from the entrance to the first kirkyard. Their stones are modest compared to the others.
The last two lines of his poem, “A Work for Poets”, are engraved in golden letters round the edge of this pink sandstone: “Carve the runes/ Then be content with silence”. There are four symbols: a sun, a ship, a star, and a cornstalk. George never liked the idea of the poet or artist being set up on a pedestal. He saw himself as a craftsman, nothing more and nothing less.
If the spirit of GMB is alive anywhere today, then it would be in Kenneth Steven. I read his novel, Glen Lyon, from 2013, on my journey home to Denmark:
It’s a contemporary yet timeless tale told in simple, strong, poetic language. Like GMB, Kenneth Steven has a cohesive, caring vision of Scottish identity, history, myth, and geography (the western isles and Perthshire in his case) as well as a deep curiosity about, and understanding of, the lot of the craftsman. I found it very moving indeed.
Here’s another essay that looks at a piece by George Mackay Brown, at its outset at least, a poem this time. It is, after all, the centenary of his birth this year. This was originally published in a poetry theme issue of Anglo Files: Journal of English Teaching in Denmark in 2015. I have tweaked it a bit since. What was the last part of it has since become the second part of my essay on cryptic structures in Farjeon and Stallings.
I do like to introduce my students to iambic verse before they tackle Shakespeare in their final year. At times, it’s a struggle, and one that most of my colleagues sidestep. And understandably so. They may well not have been taught it themselves, and many of my students also find the topic difficult. Some of them have never been asked to consider stressed and unstressed syllables before and are slow to even understand the concept. But I have never been someone to avoid a challenge. That’s what makes teaching interesting. Also for the students.
Blank verse, i.e. non-rhyming iambic pentameter (IP), is the basic pattern of Shakespeare’s plays. If students don’t understand how it works, how are they going to appreciate them? I was taught Shakespeare for O-level (in Scotland) without any mention of IP. I found it dull (although my fascination with language meant that it was not intolerably so) because I was unable to appreciate the craft that had gone into creating the text. Sidestepping the whole issue of prosody does students a disservice. They should have some experience working with IP before being introduced to Shakespeare, whose language is difficult enough in itself.
Some people might say that English prosody is too difficult for Danish teenagers. I tell my students that it’s quite an advanced approach, and they shouldn’t worry too much if they are unable to grasp too much of it. But I do have some bright students who rise to the challenge of writing rhyming iambic verse themselves, as this essay shows.
My essay about “Icarus”, a short story in George Mackay Brown’s A Time to Keep and Other Stories (1969), first appeared in The Shit Creek Review subzine, II, July 2007, but it is no longer online, so I am posting it here:
A.E. Stallings, photographed by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images for Homefront TV, September 8, 2011 in Athens, Greece
I have chosen to publish this essay on Easter Monday 2017 to mark the centenary of the death of Edward Thomas, who died on Easter Monday 1917. The first part of the essay looks at “Easter Monday”, a sonnet Eleanor Farjeon wrote in his memory. The second part examines “Fairy-tale Logic”, another sonnet, written by A.E. Stallings. Both pieces contain numerous cryptic messages that would seem to be the work of ingenious mathematical minds. It is highly unlikely, however, that the authors were conscious of the existence of these cryptic messages. I was drawn to this approach to analysis after discovering, 22 years ago, amazing numerical patterns in Elegies by Douglas Dunn.
A great picture of a magnificent rare wild beast. And it’s nice to see the deer in there too.
Here’s where this photo comes from:
I heard Kevin Gore several times in Edinburgh in August, and I’m keeping in touch. I was “with him” at Hampden to see Hibs go down to Celtic in the Cup Final. And last night Kevin saw Niel Young perform in Glasgow. Here’s rare footage of Niel Young as a youngster busking at the Gordon Street entrance to Glasgow Central Station. Tight bastards, those Scots.
Immersing oneself in folk songs is a grand way to learn about cultures, to become linguistically and musically adept, as well as politically aware, and ultimately a source through which one can carve out one’s own identity and develop one’s own talent. I am stirred especially by the folk songs of Scotland and Ireland, but also by those of other cultures, and these are thriving traditions with many interesting cross-fertilisations in recent times. One always hears about folk revivals, but the truth is folk never died. Here, for example, is a recent “short video documentary about two Scottish folk musicians, what they think and feel about their genre. A heart-warming and genuine discussion about the value of folk music as seen through the eyes of those who perform it.”
I’ve recently discovered Heidi Talbot’s music through an acquaintance with the music of John McCusker, who is now her partner. Her 2008 breakthrough album, In Love + Light, is wonderful. Here she’s talking about her latest album, Angels without Wings:
A few years ago Don Share, who has recently been appointed the new editor of Poetry, meditated on Auden’s contention, “Poetry makes nothing happen”: Poetry makes nothing happen… or does it? As he points out, contrary to popular misunderstanding, Auden is hardly saying that poetry does not change anything. The converse is more true, viz. that nothing changes poetry. Political poetry is often folk poetry or folk song and has a relevance far beyond the era that produced it. I’ll leave The Proclaimers with the final WORD:
Last week I spent five days in Paris, the first three in the company of seventy of my eighty colleagues, and the last two along with twenty of my colleagues. The last time I was in Paris was in November 1984.
Wednesday 7th November
In the morning I participate in a Da Vinci Code tour that starts at the Louvre and ends at Saint-Sulpice.
In the afternoon Peter Bögsted and I, inspired by our recent trip to Ireland, have organized…
Le pub crawl irlandais
In the early afternoon Kaare, Niels-Martin, Peter and I start out from our hotel, which is – appropriately – situated on Rue de Chemin Vert (Road of the Green Path). I’m wearing my green cap from Dublin, and Peter hasn’t taken his cap off since Ireland. And the green men at the traffic lights wave us through. After a half-hour walk our first stop is a pub called The Quiet Man(5 rue des Haudriettes, close to métro Rambuteau). The good news is that its exterior is painted green. But, far more to the point, it’s closed. We’re not too disappointed as the plan is to return tonight to hear some live music.
Before we reach the second pub on our list we spot a Guinness sign, and, feeling rather thirsty, we make an unscheduled stop at Hall’s Beer Tavern. The Guinness costs €7.20 and we’re served by an apprentice barmaid who’s max. 12 years old. There are four bar stools at a table, all solid as a rock (see the rocky-chairs sagas below), which we appropriate. We’re pretty comfy. We’re also the only customers. Two more do come in later. The Halloween decorations are still up, even though it’s November 7th. We decide that the All Saints Day holiday they’re considering moving in Denmark should be moved to November 1st, so people can celebrate Hallowe’en properly, on the actual night. The music is pretty crap. Not a scent of Irish there. This is redeemed slightly by an Oasis number, “Wonderwall”, later on. The toilets are okay.
Hall’s Beer Tavern¶¶
We proceed to Quigley’s Point (5 rue du Jour, close to métro Les Halles). Here’s another pub that’s painted green. The Guinness costs €7, and as well as pouring a better pint here the barmaid speaks English. We sit outside and get chatting with Pierre, who recommends a pub called Coolin. It’s not on our list, but it’s on our route. He tells us to ask for Michael. The toilets are okay here too, but the chairs and tables are rickety. We watch some tennis – Andy Murray giving Novak Djokovic a spanking. The music is reggae, which with a bit of goodwill can be translated to Irish music.
Quigley’s Point ¶¶¶
We wait a bit to allow another colleague, Mette, to join us. Our next stop is Corcoran’s Irish Pub (28 rue Saint André des Arts, close to métro Saint-Michel). The barman is Australian, and the Guinness costs €7. There’s no tennis on, but the barman fixes that at our second time of asking. He’s also very helpful with regard to directing us to Coolin. The music is total rubbish, and then out of the blue they play Mumford and Sons. My colleagues say the bar is hyggelig (i.e. cozy/friendly). Toilets okay.
Corcoran’s Irish Pub (Saint Michel) ¶¶¶
We find Coolin easily, and it’s got a lot of ambience and atmosphere, though the one very weird thing is that it’s part of a shopping mall. There are also some gaps in the decor. The bar is impressive though, and the bar staff are colourful. An efficient and charming platinum blonde is serving along with what looks like two brothers, but it turns out one’s from Peru and the other’s from Columbia. It transpires that the Australian barman, Michael, went back to Australia over a year ago. It’s Happy Hour, so the Guinness that normally costs €7.50 only costs €5.50. Likewise the Jameson whiskey. The music is quite nice, a sort of rap-reggae-acid rock, though hardly Irish. They have a nice big screen they roll down to show us the tennis, but it’s all over (Murray triumphant apparently). The toilet isn’t great. And again the furniture is rickety.
Coolin ¶¶¶
We take the metro to Jussieu, lose Niels-Martin, who has a terrible cold, and find Finnegan’s Wake (9 Rue des Boulangers). This pub is on a hill in a quiet neighbourhood. The Guinness is only €5 at Happy Hour, which lasts from 12pm till 2am. The bar is hardly full though. There’s football on the TV. The ambience is a tad rustic, but otherwise okay. No one bothers to check out the toilets. Or at least no one reports them to me.
Finnegan’s Wake ¶¶¶
We make our way to The Fifth Bar (62 rue Mouffetard, close to métro Place Monge). It was the sixth bar on our list, and it’s the sixth bar we’re in. (We’ve left out The Guinness Tavern – 31 Rue des Lombards, close to metro Châtelet – as Guinness costing €9 was deemed too expensive.) There are some good things about this bar. Mette joins in a game where you have to chuck a ball into a cup at the other end of the table, and after four consecutive hits makes it into the final. So that’s cool. But apart from selling Guinness (for €6) there are no signs that this is an Irish pub. The exterior is painted pink for a start, and the music can only be described as totally un-Irish. There’s a nice chap from Oregon, Brendon, serving at the bar, but this is severely countered by the French guy in charge, a petty tyrant called Thierry. Nor do they show the Celtic-Barcelona match. My most positive experience here is a walk down the hill to a Lebanese joint that serves me the best falafel I’ve ever tasted. And let me add that I make it a point to taste falafel wherever I go.
The Fifth Bar ¶
There are still five pubs left on our list:
Connolly’s Corner, 12 rue Mirbel, close to métro Censier Daubenton
Shannon River, 153 Rue du Chevaleret, close to métro Chevaleret
Irish Corner, 26 Place de la Nation, close to métro Nation
Patrick’s Irish Pub, 33 rue de Montreuil, close to métro Faidherbe Chaligny
Corcoran’s Irish Pub, 53 rue du Fauborg Saint Antoine, close to métro Bastille
Peter Bögsted
But it’s close to 9.30, and the music should be starting at The Quiet Man, so we take the metro back there, losing Mette on the way. Here, downstairs, the three of us witness a fourteen-man Irish folk music session that lasts till midnight. It’s intense yet tranquil, a piece of Ireland that’s magically surfaced elsewhere.
Claus Hebor says: “You will never find a real Irish pub outside of Ireland – it is in the walls, the beer, the people, the music, the craic. You can´t transform that to another country – it is a matter of heart and soul! A state of mind – which I´m just beginning to understand… It´s the magic of Ireland!” He may well be right, but he’d also be the first to agree that there’s nothing wrong in trying to find the magic of Ireland outside of Ireland. That’s the beauty of magic. It’s about achieving the impossible. For me Ireland is a state of mind I can take with me everywhere I go.
The Quiet Man ¶¶¶¶
Thursday 8th November
In the morning I visit The Louvre, which inspires me to visit the Delacroix Museum, where I see some more of Delacroix’s paintings, and where I also buy The Journal of Eugène Delacroix. He was quite an Anglophile, and I’m looking forward to his reflections on life and art.
In the afternoon I head up to the 20th arrondissement and along with three colleagues witness street art between Télégraph and Beauville. I’m especially impressed by the town planner who has labelled a street that is a full 20 metres in length “Rue de L’ Avenir” (Road of the Future).
There’s just time for an hour-long bath back at the hotel – my feet aren’t used to all that walking – before we all head off for some supper on the Seine.
Marie-Louise Hurup
Heidi Dueholm
I try to take photos of my colleagues from inside the boat with the Eiffel Tower in the background, but the reflections in the windows drown out the lights on the tower.
I’ve no idea the Eiffel Tower is so close when this picture is taken the other way, which for some reason means the reflections in the windows don’t drown out the lights on the tower.
We carry on partying, first at Cuba Compagnie, close to the hotel, and then, against all better judgment, at the hotel bar:
Kim Sönderskov
Jens Jönsson and his wife, Anne
Sune Petersen
Friday 9th November
Inspired by fellow poet, Jayne Osborn, who was hoping to have been here, I have invited myself chez ex-pat poet, Brian Allgar. I spend a warm and wonderful evening with him and his wife, Françoise, in the 20th arrondissement near Place de Edith Piaf. The first part of the evening is spiced by the company of a good old friend of his, Andrew Duncan-Jones, a very erudite and literary guy. Brian and I have a lot in common.
Saturday 10th November
In the late afternoon I wander over to La Place des Vosges to meet up with some colleagues for cake and coffee. The café can’t seat all seven of us, and we have to settle for drinks elsewhere.
Later on Kim, Niels and I head up to Stade de France to see France beat Australia 33-6 at rugby.
“We have to rediscover Africa. The first encounter with Africa by Europe was the wrong one. It was not an encounter. It was an appropriation. What they saw, and bequeathed to future ages, was in fact a misperception. They did not see Africa. This wrong seeing of Africa is part of the problems of today. Africa was seen through greed and what could be got from it. This justified all kinds of injustice.”
“If we see it, it will be revealed. We only see what we are prepared to see. Only what we see anew is revealed to us.” – from “Healing the Africa Within” in A Time for New Dreams
I was on a course at the Danish Cultural Institute in Edinburgh in August in conjunction with the International Book Festival. The highlight for me was the three-part presentation of and by Ben Okri.
A Bizarre Piece of Theatre
First we saw what I would call a bizarre but brilliant piece of theatre, “The Comic Destiny”, an adaptation of a piece from Ben Okri’s Tales of Freedom (2009) by David WW Johnstone, who was also one of the three actors. Then, the next morning, we were given a lecture on post-colonial Nigerian literature by David Richards, where Ben Okri was one of the three main writers discussed. And an hour later we went to hear Ben Okri himself at the Book Festival.
My colleagues were not as thrilled as I was by the play. In fact the vast majority of them were rather stumped. In this they were not alone.
In his introduction to Tales of Freedom (2009) Okri says:
The following tales are properly “stokus”. A stoku is an amalgam of short story and haiku. It is a story as it inclines towards a flash of a moment, insight, vision or paradox.
Here’s Jay Parini’s verdict:
Needless to say, a writer should not have to tell us what has been attempted. These are vague sketches – ill-formed, framed in generalised symbolic language, with only occasional moments of genuine poetry and insight.
Of “The Comic Destiny” itself Parini says:
It’s difficult to enjoy the boredom on display here. Okri strains mightily, but the gold of meaning eludes him. Attempts to generate plot crumble into empty symbolic gestures… The lively particulars that animated Okri’s earlier fiction are oddly missing. “The Comic Destiny” is finally a rough outline for a fable that never gets written – not in any memorable way. (The Guardian, 25th April 2009)
–The play adaptation
Charlotte Jarvis, David WW Johnstone, and Robert Williamson
There are smashing performances from David WW Johnstone, Charlotte Jarvis and Robert Williamson in experimental theatre company Lazzi’s innovative but frequently incomprehensible adaptation of a story from Ben Okri’s Tales of Freedom.
Three characters offer fragmented insights into broken relationships, minds and an Eden gone rotten, as the boundaries between a rehearsal process and performance are broken down. Relaxed comic banter is juxtaposed with bursts of aggression, creating an arresting but oblique kind of drama that wears thin over 75 minutes.
Both Okri and the beautifully lit production are being deliberately avant-garde, but it’s often difficult to tell what’s happening, where and why. (Sally Stott, The Scotsman)
The main problem with “The Comic Destiny” is that it is too long. The performance overran and the extended sequence at the end almost felt like a drama warm-up exercise, rather than a fitting culmination of the play. Scenes pack emotional punch, but are then hampered by being dragged out. The end result is dilution. There is acting power and a boldness of experimentation here that is seriously impressive. However, it is surrounded by material that fails to fully reach the same heights. (Michael Tansini)
There are moments of comedy in “The Comic Destiny”, but it is also a contemplation of fear, suspicion and self loathing. There are genuinely disturbing moments. By working together, the actors and characters overcome their challenges.
And that is what I ultimately took away from the piece – that there is no light without shadow, no day without night, and that in life (if not constitutional politics) we are better together. Except for when we are better apart. (Scottish poet, Christie Williamson)
–The production has since gone on to Riverside Studios in Hammersmith
…this was a messy and unconvincing production, with only hints of some deeper meaning. (Robert Cumber) __________________________________________________________________________________________
“Destiny is difficult,” said Ben Okri at the outset of his event at the Book Festival. Soon afterwards he also said: “You’re not loved, but so what?” They are parallel observations. We only find ourselves when we are rejected by our fellows; and that is our destiny. As E.E. Cummings said: “To be nobody-but-yourself – in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” (A Poet’s Advice”, 1958)
Later on at Ben Okri’s event we were to have the privilege of witnessing the three actors we’d seen the evening before performing a dramatic scene from “The Comic Destiny”. This was followed by a conversation between Okri and Johnstone in which they explained the circumstances that led to the adaptation. The two met when Johnstone was the last person in line at a book signing in Edinburgh, and the moment Okri saw him he knew that this was the man who would adapt “The Comic Destiny” for the stage. We heard how much this piece means to Okri, and how he has refused to be disheartened by the fact that not a lot of people seem to “get it”. I was reminded of what Colm Tóibín said at another Book Festival event: “The main thing is never to worry what other people think of your work.”
A Much More Accessible Ben Okri
Before being given these extra insights into the play, however, we were shown a very different side to Ben Okri. He read several poems from his very recent poetry collection, Wild, as well as an extract – “Obsession” – from his recent collection of essays, A Time for New Dreams. These were all immediately accessible, quite the opposite of “The Comic Destiny”. To illustrate this I have chosen an extract from one of his essays (at the outset) as well as these two short poems:
The World Is Rich
They tell me that the world
Is rich with terror.
I say the world is rich
With love unfound.
It’s inside us and all around.
Terror is there, no doubt
Violence, hunger and drought;
Rivers that no longer
Flow to the sea.
It’s the shadow of humanity.
There’s terror in the air.
And we have put it there.
We have made God into an enemy,
Have made God into a weapon,
A poverty, a blindness, an army.
But the world is rich with
Great love unfound:
Even in the terror
There is love, twisted round
And round. Set it free.
River, flow to the sea.
I Sing a New Freedom
I sing a new freedom
In days of fire.
Freedom with discipline.
We need freedom to rise higher.
Be true to your true self
In the rich follies of our times.
Become the force you are
In this era of economic crimes.
Only those who remain free in spirit
Will find their way out of this maze.
But we are children of the stars,
And we ought to amaze.
I was very taken by both Ben Okri’s presence and his performance. Cool and casual, yet enormously articulate; generous and gentle, yet commanding a vision of steel. In short, charismatic. He put me in mind of Denzel Washington’s wonderful portrayal of Steve Biko in Cry Freedom! I bought both his recent collections and also had him sign them, which in itself was an uplifting experience.
Teaching Ben Okri
Upon my return to Denmark, I felt inspired to do a course on him for my second-year students. I found some great videos of him on the Internet, which meant the students too were able to engage with the man himself.
At the beginning of their first year the students had studied non-fiction texts, and, at the end of the year, a wide selection of George Mackay Brown’s poems and short stories. In the latter case I’d made a point of trying to make them aware of what characterized the two different genres, poem and short story. So after three weeks of studying a selection of Okri’s essays and poems –
From A Time for New Dreams (Rider, 2011):
“Plato’s Dream”, “Hospitality”, “Obsession” (from “Dramatic Moments in the Encounter between Picasso and African Art”), “10½ Inclinations”, “Self-Censorship”, “One Planet, One People”, “London, Our Future City”, “Musings on Beauty” & “A Time for New Dreams”
From Wild (Rider, 2012):
“My Mother Sleeps”, “The World is Rich”, “The Ruin and the Forest”, “The Rhino”, “Migrations”, “I Sing a New Freedom”, “As Clouds Do Drift” & “New Year Poem: O That Abstract Garden”
– I set them the following essay:
Write an essay of ca. 1,200 words in which you analyze and interpret at least one poem from Ben Okri’s Wild (Rider, 2012) and analyze and comment on at least one essay from Ben Okri’s A Time for New Dreams (Rider, 2011). Your essay must contain a discussion of his use of genre, i.e. essay vis-à-vis poem.
After they’d handed in their essays I had them study three other poems in order to encourage some comparison with other poets:
Richard Wilbur, “In Trackless Woods”, from “Mayflies”, Harcourt (New York, 2000) Gerald Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid” (1883) Patience Agbabi, “Prologue”, from Transformatrix(Payback Press, 2000)
My students had great fun performing these three poems, and the vast majority of the class had also enjoyed Ben Okri’s poems (and essays) and found them very accessible. Nevertheless they were not at all keen to say anything about these three poems in relation to Ben Okri’s poems. I can understand this up to a point – poems can often be hard to pin down – but had they been willing to compare them directly to Ben Okri’s poems, then there was a lot they could have said about the differences and similarities between the two. Only one student was prepared to go out on a limb and say that Agbabi was banal in comparison to Okri. A very fair point. And it gave me the opportunity to ask the students about the target group of the respective poets, whereupon they were fairly quick to realize that Patience Agbabi’s intended audience was quite a bit younger than Ben Okri’s.
Although the students had been asked in their essays to compare the characteristics of the two genres, poem and essay, very few students saw that the natural way to do so was by actually comparing the two pieces they had chosen. Here it should be noted that the class includes a fair number of above-average students, and that I had invited them to draw comparisons between the poems and the essays in class. And even though I had made a virtue out of cross-references to Okri’s texts in class, very few students mentioned more than one poem and one essay. If there is one thing that students need to be encouraged in, it is comparison, as it is often the easiest way to define something, to put it into context, to put it into perspective. If we are asked to describe a singer, then we will often draw comparisons to other singers. We can only do so, however, if we are acquainted with a wide range of singers. Aye, and there’s the rub.
Most of the students only touched very briefly on Okri’s use of genre, if at all. There were exceptions, e.g.:
The poem doesn’t contain many poetical elements and it’s mostly because of the length, the layout and the rhymes that we recognize this as a poem. It’s a compressed story, only the essence of the short story who survived “the poem cutter”. It isn’t complicated hard poetry, but more like epic prose.
The essay London, our future city contains some repeating, enumeration and underlining by saying the same thing in different ways. In many ways this essay is much more poetic than the poem. It’s not as clear and straight as the poem.
Ben Okri is playing with the genres. Mixing them around. The poem The world is rich could be an essay as well as the essay London, our future city could be a poem.
Ben Okri calls his essays “poetic essays”, and in his Edinburgh talk he said that the poetry collection that followed the essays is a distillation of these. No doubt my student is done a disservice by poetry being classified as fiction. She calls the poem “a compressed story, only the essence of the short story who survived ‘the poem cutter’”. My guess is that she was unable to bring herself to write that the poem is “a compressed essay”, as that would mean that the poem was a work of non-fiction. And yet in her final sentence she shows she does understand what it’s all about: “The poem… could be an essay /and/ the essay… could be a poem.”
If ever there was a genre that inhabits the no-man’s land between fiction and non-fiction, then it is poetry. The poem always has a speaker, and while the poem’s speaker sometimes gives a fictional account and can therefore be termed “the narrator”, at other times the speaker simply issues a statement, or makes a speech, or gives an eye-witness account. And just as a statement, or a speech, or an interview should be classified as non-fiction, so then should these types of poem. And in fact many poems are more non-fiction than fiction inasmuch as they are statements about or descriptions of real-life events. I am therefore now encouraging my students to use the term, “the speaker”, rather than “the narrator”, in poems of this type.
In this context it is worth noting that Amisha Ghadiali calls the title piece of Okri’s essay collection “this poem” at the end of her recording of it. She has also singled out a poem of his from 1990, “An African Elegy“, which is very much in the same vein as many of the pieces in Wild.
The 13th Steve Biko Lecture
On September 13th Ben Okri gave the 13th Steve Biko Lecture commemorating the 35th anniversary of his brutal death. Here’s a podcast of his moving eulogy to Steve Biko and Black Consciousness.
There’s also a video. Ben Okri comes on at around the 21-minute mark:
The transcript can be accessed here. There are a few mistakes in it, so I’ve corrected them and added my version below.
Molweni! Vice-Chancellor, Max Price, Mr Nkosinathi Biko, members of the extraordinary Biko family, members of the Board of Trustees, the Minister of National Planning, Deputy-Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, distinguished guests, comrades, ladies and gentlemen – and in South African parlance, all protocols observed. Preliminaries first: I really want to thank the Biko family for the magical honour of giving this talk today and for inviting me to South Africa for my first visit to your really beautiful country. It’s more than an honour to give the 13th Steve Biko Lecture commemorating the 35th anniversary of his brutal death and transition from activist against Apartheid to one of the guiding ancestors of justice and freedom not only in South Africa but all over the world. I want to especially thank Nkosinathi for the personal invitation as well as to congratulate him for the extraordinary work they have done in making available to the world the transfigured meaning of Steve Biko’s legacy.
Fifteen years ago Nkosinathi inaugurated the creation of a Steve Biko memorial, and these memorial lectures have acquired great significance. I am struck by the richness and variety of the people who have given the lectures, from the great Nelson Mandela himself to the delightful and dancing Desmond Tutu, giants of black and African literature like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Ndebele, who gave the inaugural lecture, and Alice Walker; formidable presidents like Thabo Mbeki, and that legendary Finance Minister, Trevor Manuel.
As you know, this is the 13th Memorial Lecture, and I happen to consider the number 13 to be a very lucky number indeed, combining as it does the Hebrew letter for 1, which means “love” – do your research – with the Hebrew letter for 3, which means “unity”. Maybe the fusion of love and unity in a world fatally divided and dangerously unstable may be one of the secret themes of my talk this evening: Biko and the Tough Alchemy of Africa.
Your great struggle and your history have been the background music to our lives. We grew up with a consciousness of your struggle, and your suffering and heroism have accompanied us through the years. In a sense your struggle highlighted to us all over the continent the meaning of justice. As a child growing up just after independence in Nigeria, one of the first moral questions about the world was posed to me by your circumstance: that there was a country, that there were countries in which it was enshrined that one race was inferior to another, and that one race can dehumanise another, posed to me questions that went right to the very root of existence. For many of us it even made us question the existence of God. Such injustice we felt could only exist in a godless universe.
The Sharpeville massacre of 1966 with its unforgettable images that seared themselves into the consciousness of the world was one of those world events that awoke us from our moral sleep. I was roughly the same age as the children being slaughtered in that famous picture, and it instantly made me aware that our fates are one. I don’t know how other people in other continents saw that picture, but from that day I too became a black South African, and we suffered with you in your sufferings and willed you on in your struggles.
You have no idea what you mean in the historic consciousness of the world. Sometimes it seems that awful things in history happen to compel us to achieve the impossible, to challenge our idea of humanity. Your struggle, mirrored around the world, is one of the greatest struggles of our time. It poses and continues to pose the biggest questions facing humanity; massive philosophical questions that have never really been tackled by the great thinkers of the human race. These are some of the questions which your history posed: Are human beings really equal? Is justice fundamental to humanity or is justice a matter of law? Is there evil? Can different races really live together? Is love unreal in human affairs? Why is there so much suffering? Why do some people seem to suffer more than others? Can the will of a people overcome great injustice? Can a people transform their lives and their society through the power of a new vision? Does God exist? And is God unfair?
All across the continent and everywhere where the human heart responds to the suffering of others, these questions were a nagging kind of music. All across Africa these questions troubled us – and, among the voices that articulated a profoundly bold and clear response to these big questions of fate, injustice and destiny, one whose voice pierced our minds was that of Steve Biko. One of my points of affinity with Biko is with his rigour and his high standards of expectation of the human and the African spirit. He asks fundamental questions like: Who are you? What are you? Are you what others say you are? What is your selfhood? What makes you a man or a woman? He asks questions which will be relevant in hundreds of years’ time, questions which are an inevitable part of a free society. We need to reincarnate Biko’s rigour, his high standards, and his forensic questioning of society and all of its assumptions. We need to keep alive Biko’s fierce and compassionate truthfulness. In fact, we need Biko’s spirit now more than ever. If he were here today he might well ask such questions as: Is the society just? Are we being truthful about one another? Has there been a real change of attitudes and assumptions on both sides of the racial divide? He might have expressed concern about the police reaction to the striking miners of Marikana. He would have said that it does not need to be said that the murders and the use of apartheid laws to try the miners are shocking to the international community and that it has disturbing resonances with his own death. He might well ask: Has there been a reconciliation without proper consideration? He might ask whether the things that he fought against have merely mutated, like certain cancerous cells. It is a strange kind of fate for Biko to have suffered, for in being so unjustly cut down so early, he remains for us perpetually poised in the stance of his difficult questions.
And to think of Biko is to have those questions always come alive in our minds. He is like Kafka’s axe that can always be used against the frozen seas of lies and hidden attitudes that clog up the flow of a society’s possibilities. He is a figure of constant truth that will continue to haunt the history of this nation as it negotiates through time the continued hidden legacy of Apartheid. It is not surprising that his most famous work is called I Write What I Like. In a sense Biko transcends politics and has in him something of the terrible integrity of the true artist, one who with hammer blows will relentlessly pursue his vision of exalted truth regardless of its consequences. In that sense Biko is more than just the unfinished conscience of this land; he is also that finger pointing at the only acceptable future: a life and a society in which citizens can be proud of what they are. Biko’s spirit is permanently, fantastically set against the humiliation of man and woman. His spirit is set against the mediocrity of consciousness, the mediocrity of a consciousness that lives without a sense of what is happening to others. He is not an easy guide. He does not like laziness or lazy thinking. He has the rigour of a young man who will not accept that a decent life is impossible for his people. He will not accept that an agreement has been reached without frank and exhaustive dialogue. He may well think that too much has been given away too soon. He may even think that the people who have not honestly acknowledged the depth of the injustice they inflicted on others may still in fact harbour the seeds of those injustices.
In many ways Biko reminds me of Nietzsche; he did not trust pity, and he might have thought forgiveness not really forgiving till the fire of truth has been brought into the consciousness of the one to be forgiven. Generosity without steel can be a weak thing, just as steel without generosity can be a cruel thing. This may be one of the real tragedies of Biko’s death. The apartheid struggle needed a dual strand: its hard and its gentle; its sternness and its compassion; its fire and its water. With the murder of Biko some tougher questions which would have been insisted upon might have found a more authentic advocate. The fact is that a nation cannot escape from itself and from all of its truths, and all of its lies. If its lies linger too long in the unspoken dialogue of a people, sooner or later they will lead to unpleasantness. Even though Biko be absent, the people in the shanty towns, the poor and the hungry, feel the shadow of those lies, feel the pointedness in their lives of the questions that Biko might be asking today.
Great struggles tend to throw up great spirits. Great suffering tends to throw up great minds who refuse to accept the terms of that suffering. Something of the spirit of Prometheus breathed in the voice of people like Steve Biko; voices who refused to accept the definition of his people by those who define it downwards. Prometheus suffered his incarceration on the great rock of Tartarus because he stole fire from the gods to give to humanity. One of the recipients of that fire was Steve Biko. I am aware that there are many recipients of that fire – people like the great man, Nelson Mandela, father of the nation, figures like Chris Hani, freedom’s prince. But Steve Biko’s fate is one of latest in a long chain of Promethean destinies. Like the phoenix of classical mythology, his end was his beginning. The power and truth of his ideas spread with a special brilliance because of the flame of his death. It is one of the curious things about history that whenever they kill the incarnation of truth, its voice is multiplied a thousandfold.
Your history has taught the world a thing or two about the human spirit. From you we learned that eventually the spirit is unconquerable. From you we learned that history is not inevitable, but must be fought for with blood, with courage and with wisdom. From you we learned that the impossible belongs to those who have not peered deep into the darkest darkness of the night and still believe in the cycle of the sun. Forgive this rhapsody, but often we take history for granted, and those who live through it and come through it take it as a kind of nightmare or a dream and therefore a kind of unreality. For most of my life it seemed that Apartheid could not be overcome. Our rage at its reality seemed to have collapsed against what seemed like its eternity. It seemed one of those unacceptable facts etched into the fabric of the world. In England, where I lived, in the latter part of my life, it was assumed by many that Apartheid would be with us for generations. It seemed like one of those unalterable facts, like fate, or the moon, or like hunger. But a great injustice rouses something very deep in the human spirit, something deep that goes all the way back to the gods. You can almost say that great injustice awakens in us the same forces that shape the world, a force greater than destiny itself, a force that comes from the fire of the demiurge, a force that tears down mountains and throws up continents, a force like a bursting volcano, a force of thunder. This is a force slow to arouse but once roused and awoken, hard to control. Such a force unleashed itself in the French Revolution and gave birth to one of the great nations of the world and some of the great philosophies of freedom. Such a force was roused in the American Revolution, one of the Father Revolutions of the human race. But this force does not unleash itself in revolutions only; it can burn in civil wars, it can implode in gulags and force inhuman policies and orgiastic historic rages.
When a people overcome the impossible, they achieve, eventually, a kind of evolutionary shift and epistemological break. They realise, eventually, deep in their souls something powerful about their will: they are never quite the same people again. They change, subtly, something in their DNA. They also experience a state of unreality.
History is like a nightmare we wake up from after a struggle and blink in stupefaction at the strangeness of daylight. With awakening a great energy is freed; a new question is posed: the nightmare is over, but what do we do with the day? We do not have enough psychologists of history. Everyone seems to treat history as if our reaction to it should be logical. If people have emerged from a mutual nightmare, what should they do upon awakening? What should anyone do after a long trauma? What can anyone do?
Nations too, like individuals, need to heal. And healing takes several forms. For some, healing is probing the wounds, seeking causes, pursuing redress. For others, healing is dreaming; it is an act of vision during which time a future is dreamt of, shaped, and put into place. For them healing is an opportunity to transform themselves out of all that suffering, all that trauma, and the heroic effort of all that overcoming. The unfortunate thing about history is that it gives us no rest, no holidays. There are no pauses; we go from struggle to struggle. The struggle to overcome and then the struggle to live, to grow, to realise the potential seated in our bones. We go from tearing down the unacceptable to building the desirable without much of a break in the dance.
But how long does this magic period last, the period of raised consciousness when a people realise the surging through them of all the best energies of the human spirit, when they have effected a profound change in their destiny and feel the euphoria of overcoming? How long does it last, this sense of having climbed a mountain top against all the odds and gazing back down over the journey accomplished, and feeling for a long historical moment the sense that with the will primed and the vision clear, anything is possible?
Historical exaltation is too short. Life comes rushing in. No one can dwell on a mountain top long; the air there is too pure and unreal. The value of mountain tops is not to live on them but to see from them. To see into the magic and difficult distances, to see something of the great journey still ahead; to see, in short, the seven mountains that are hidden when we climb. It may be only once that the people have such a vision. Maybe very, very great nations have such a vision a few times, and each time they do they effect a profound renewal in their history and take a quantum leap in their development. Most nations never glimpse the mountain top at all, never sense the vastness and the greatness of the gritty glory that lies ahead of them in the seven mountains, each concealed behind the other. Maybe Ancient Greece saw such a vision a few times and dreamt up its notion of a flawed democracy and left its lasting legacy in its architecture, its literature, but above all in its political structure for unleashing its genius upon the world. Maybe Ancient Rome saw such a vision a few times too and built its straight roads through history, wrestled with the idea of freedom and tyranny and conquered a sizeable portion of the known world, and left for us their ambiguous legacy of empire, literature and mind.
But it is not often that a people reach a mountain top and descend with a rich vision of a transformed life for all of its people and then set about realising it. Too often the euphoria gets swept away into an ideology of state. Too often it is squandered. Too often that great moment is lost, never to be experienced again, and eventually forgotten in the mountainous piling up of day after day after day after day of ordinary reality; the mire of history, till disillusion and despair and boredom set in. And a people who could have given mankind a new reality of how a society can be, in a world where so many good dreams are failing, becomes a society that scrabbles in the sand; its eyes weep in poverty with division and tribal conflict at its heart and emptiness in its days, its resources and hopes eaten away by corruption – a society that faces into the darkness and the dullness with that glimpse of the mountain top faded into ordinary sunlight.
We invest great hopes in people who manage a great overcoming. Maybe because of a certain nostalgia for our lost moment when we too could have been a light to the world, or maybe for a nostalgia for what can be the hope that we too can effect our own modest daily overcoming against destiny. We like to believe that those who suffered can show us the true meaning of that suffering, which is to point a new way for humanity to be. There is no greater value to suffering than in having the authority to create a better, fairer, truer, and more beautiful life for its people. There are those who think that suffering brutalises and dehumanises and turns men and women into animals. There are those who see in Africa’s troubles nothing but what they unintelligibly call ‘African nihilism’. There are, to be sure, many cracks and fissures in the human spirit, and unimaginable horrors have been unleashed in Europe and Asia and America; history shows no one to have completely pure hands. But those who have had injustice perpetrated on them, who have suffered unbelievable variations of humiliation and brutality, ought to have a special light and vision on the nature of justice. This will be true of course but for what Hamlet calls “bad dreams”. Hence the necessity of that unique kind of healing. Personally, I favour healing as dreaming. A society comes through fire, a nightmare, and it ought to heal through dreaming; not the dream of sleep but the dream of vision.
In some ways unreality is easier than reality. And the reality of freedom demands more consistency, vision, courage, and practical love than was suspected in the unreality of injustice. And what defines a society is not how it overcomes its night, but what it does with the long ever-after days of sunlight. Some will say that we emerged from the night with our hands tied, and that the sunlight still has a lot of night in it, and that the terms of our freedom and the context of our independence put lead weights on our feet in a field where others have been running with free feet and machine-assisted feet for hundreds of years before we entered the strange game.
Some will even say that at every stage of our emergence into sunlight we were hassled, sabotaged, undermined, and the terms of our participation fixed and limited – and that we are being judged in a game in which the terms and conditions are twisted and lopsided in ways so subtle that no one notices how they damn our participation before we begin. Some will say many such things – how we play, not our game, but the game of others, and how our leaders are confused and our participants corrupted, and the people cheated and betrayed and left behind in hunger and poverty in the long after-years of sunlight.
These things may or may not be true. What is true is that no one will hand us the destiny that we want. No one will carry us to the future that our bones and our history crave for. We must do it ourselves. It seems that the courage, and the ingenuity, and the toughness required for getting us out of the night are indeed required much, much more for the ever-after day of the long after-years of sunlight. Freedom was just the overture. Indeed, freedom may just turn out to be a very small part of the true story of a people. The real story begins with what they did with that freedom.
Part 2:
This has been the real challenge of Africa. This has been the real challenge of our times. Can we make something worthwhile of our freedom? Can we be fruitful and workable nations? Can we create a good life for our people? But more crucially, can we make sustained and important contributions to the world and help in our own way to take forward human civilisation? On the whole it can be said that African nations began with hope, fell into chaos, and staggered into dependency. Or to take another variation it can be said that African nations began in unity, collapsed into multiplicity, and stumbled in division. Or, to weave one more jazz note of history, that African nations began in dreams, were overwhelmed by reality, and stumbled about in nightmare. Or to take a classical turn, African nations came, saw, and squandered.
All across the world in the late fifties and sixties could be heard what Byron once called “The First Dance of Freedom”. Not long afterwards came the cry of failure as civil wars, tribalism, coups and corruption descended on the recent freedom dances. Then came the long decades of anomie that was such a feast of gloating and salivation for western observers and their Naipaul converts. People emerged from the African world into a European-shaped reality in two or three generations, and no one wonders that there would be some confusion. People entered an arena in which others had been shaping themselves as nation states over hundreds of year, and no one wonders that they would at first seem inadequate. The fact is we might have lost control of our self-perception. We might have lost control of how we see ourselves in the modern world. We see ourselves and measure ourselves with outwardly determined standards. We don’t play our game. We don’t choose our values. But more seriously, emerging from African reality into modern reality has had one major effect: time has gotten speeded up for us. We are having to accomplish in ten years what it took European nations 2,000 years to accomplish. Africa is having to compress in a short time her own equivalent of the Roman Conquest, the Viking marauders, the Black Death, feudalism, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution (with its dark, Satanic mills), capitalism, the Poverty Act, the union of the four warring nations, and the unholy spoils of colonialism – all into a few solitary decades.
There is, however, another way to read history. It could be said that African nations have emerged from the long reality of their selfhood into a different time and are engaged in a complex historical adjustment. We need to define history more accurately, and the history of African people – the Luo, the Bantu, the KwaZulu, the Yoruba, the Uhrobo, to give a tiny example – is long, unique, and needs to be written and studied. History is not the story of the impact of the western world on the African world; that is a small part of our history.
History is not objective. The meaning of history keeps on revealing itself through time. Like a text of infinite interpretability, history yields new meanings in relation to the eyes that behold it and the pressures of the times. History may be memory; history may be vengeance; history may be redemption – but whatever history is, it is too soon to extrapolate the meaning of our recent histories. Those who write about history in haste and fall into quick judgements find that the long unfolding of events change the meaning of the facts upon which they base their judgements. Time is a great ironist. The historian who makes a quick judgement again the United States of America right in the middle of her apocalyptic Civil War would be made foolish by the unfolding destiny of that nation.
History may be fact; history may be dream; history may be revelation. It is not how things are that count; it’s what you do with them, what vision you have, and with what strength you march towards that vision. We need a new consciousness. History is alwaysresponsive to a new consciousness.
Part 3:
They say the greater the mistakes the greater the lessons that can be learned. Africa has surely made enough mistakes for us to learn from. Among other things we are rich in mistakes. Some nations in the world made their mistakes over thousands of years; we made ours over decades. We have made enough mistakes to become nations of genius if we had that inclination. Maybe that is why there is the beginnings of a new consciousness, a new stirring of national success slowly creeping across the continent. But what are some of these mistakes: the slide towards dictatorship and tyranny, corruption becoming a ‘natural’ part of the national fabric, the depletion of national resources by ruling elites, the erosion of civil liberties, the failure to realise that nations can die just like businesses, companies or individuals. You do not need me to tell you that if Biko were alive today, his cry to Africa would be to put its house in order. He would be appalled at the civil wars, the failure to feed and educate the people, the greed of government officials, and the general failure to live up to the promise of the great struggle for liberation. He would be harder on us than our critics because he would expect from us the highest standards of national life.
I interpret Black Consciousness not only in relation to the history of oppression; I interpret it also as an injunction to the highest fulfilment of a people’s possibilities. Black Consciousness means nothing if it does not also mean the best flowering of our reality. To me Black Consciousness means equality, freedom, community, grassroots transformation, but it also means excellence, humanity, foresight, wisdom, and a transcendence of our weakness and our flaws. Stripped of its specific context of Apartheid, the core of Black Consciousness does not seem to me a polarising message. Rather it is a call for the awakening of the spirit, a call such as the ancestors might have made. Wherever a people are oppressed, the first thing they must remember is who they are. But once liberation has been achieved, the first thing they must remember is who they want to be. The heart of Black Consciousness is a message of ‘becoming’; its goal is not limited, it hints at a continuing journey of self-discovery and self-realisation. This can be as wide and as expansive as the mind that interprets it. There can be no end to our self-realisation. Every day we discover more and more who we can be – this is what Black Consciousness says to me: become who you are, and also, become what you truly can be. It is an injunction to greatness. In fact, it is an injunction to leadership. It says, in effect, that black people. because of their history and all that they have learned, should show the world a new way of being – to paraphrase him, a better way of being human.
Part 4:
There are three kinds of leaders. There are the ones who make; there are the ones who bring meaningful change. There are the ones who make change real. And then there are those who squander the possibilities of their times. The challenge of our times has always been the challenge of leadership. It is not the only challenge, but it is the most symbolic. Black Consciousness is an injunction to leadership because the people can only be as liberated as its leaders are – in that sense Black Consciousness says that in liberating your mind, in freeing your consciousness, you should be your own leader. Everyone therefore carries the burden of leadership. To that degree, the leaders that you have says something about the kind of people that you are.
Previously leadership was considered on its own, as an isolated event of responsibility. We tended to blame our leaders for our failings. The micro-responsibility of Black Consciousness implies that we should blame or praise ourselves for our leaders, for they are what we have enabled them to become. To me Black Consciousness suggests that the people take the responsibilities for their lives, their societies, their destiny. This is not a textual but an intuitive reading of Black Consciousness. I am not advocating civil unrest, but that the people are complicit in how their societies are run, how their history turns out. The people cannot be passive about the single most important thing that affects them, which is the running of their lives. In that sense there is a micro and a macro dimension of Black Consciousness, but its core is that of liberating for all time and in all historical circumstances the consciousness, the conscience, and the spirit of a people. After all, the people cannot come awake in their oppression and fall right back asleep after their liberation. A continued wakefulness is the burden of Black Consciousness; a continued vigilance is its responsibility. More than that, an ever-higher refinement of the possibilities of the people, an ever-higher reach in its potential and their realisation ought to be its goal.
The renewal of a people, of a continent, is a miraculous thing. And it happens when a great new idea takes root in a people; when they see the image of themselves not as they were, but as they can be. It is a renewed self-vision. Its source is a potent and enchanted vision; it is conveyed through inspiration and sustained by example. Through the undercurrents of our minds the idea is passed along that we can have good houses, good roads, decent education, fulfilling jobs. The idea is passed along in the undercurrents of our minds that we can stand tall and be fruitful under the sun. The idea is passed along that no one needs to starve and that everyone can have access to health services. The idea is passed along that we can question many of our beliefs, that we can apply reason to our inherited notions, that we can transfigure our superstitions. The idea is passed along that we can transcend our tribalism without losing our roots; that we can transcend our religion without losing our faith. The idea is passed along that we can transcend our race without losing its uniqueness; that we can transcend our past without losing our identity. It is passed along that we can only look forward – and that has been done many times in history all over the world and is being done slowly today in Asia, in places like Brazil – that we can remake our societies closer to our heart’s desire. The idea is passed along that now is the time to show the true greatness at the heart of your liberation. Now is the time to create a society commensurate to the ideals which the people fought for and for which so many died. That the fire of your history is a refining fire, producing from the blood of martyrs the goal of a new civilization.
Part 5:
In alchemy there are two ways to accomplish what is known as the great work. They are called “the dry way” and “the wet way”. The dry way is short and dangerous. The wet way is long and safe. In political terms the short way requires a certain kind of dictatorship, a thoroughly unified people, and a highly focused vision – Japan, the Soviet Union and China in some ways exemplify this; they tried to bring about fantastic transformation in society in a very short time. The results are often ambivalent. With Stalin and Chairman Mao millions died, and the spectre of the gulags haunt such experiments. Only Japan uniquely showed the fruitfulness of this difficult way. But for nations of diversity involving a land of many tribes and many races, the ideal seems to be the wet way. Europe took its time to arrive at its current stability. America needed 200 years and a civil war to become itself.
We must measure time differently. Our history began long before the history of others. We must measure time not in the length of oppression but by the persistence of our dreams – and our dreams go back a long way, way beyond the fall of Carthage, which Mandela says we are to rebuild, and way beyond the first imperfect Egyptian pyramids. The cycles of time, like the inundation of the Nile, have deposited on us the immeasurable silt of human experiences. We have great wealth in all that is at the root of humanity. If there is a correlation between experience and wisdom, between suffering and understanding, Africa is the richest delta of possible transformation. The dream of our ancestors nestles in the Rift Valley, when the greatest enemy of man was not man but night itself. Our ancestors battled with all manner of monsters and evils within and without – and this long period of time and long march to civilisation must have forged in them some unconquerable sense of the human spirit. Just as rocks bear the strata of the ages they have witnessed, so deep inside us are the strata of unmeasured overcoming.
Let us be tempered. May the fire of history burn us into a new consciousness. Let the white learn from the black and the black learn from the white – I’m quoting Taoism here – your different histories come together in one great sea. Let us raise one another. You have something special to give the world, and the gift of your genius, our genius, will be revealed not long after we claim the right to be ourselves. We can be no one else. We must therefore accept our history with all of its flaws. We should hide nothing from ourselves about who we have been. We can only transform that which we face. What we are now is only the present slice of the picture of ourselves; there can be no final definition of what we are. We grow and change in accordance with necessity and vision, and yet in some mysterious way we become more and more ourselves.
Thirty-five years ago a visionary son of the soil who was going to become a doctor was slain. From his grave may a thousand dreams of freedom rise. May the vengeance for his torture and his slaughter be the constant coming into being of a beautiful South Africa, where the frisson between the races be always creative and compel them towards dynamic harmony, and where the intelligence in the rich nurturing of citizenship is nourished by the dragon’s blood of his and other martyrs’ immolation. Pass the word on. Pass the word along the five great rivers of Africa – from the Cape of Wise Hope to the sinuous mountains and the tranquil savannahs. Pass on the word that there are three Africas. The one that we see every day, the one that they write about, and the real, magical Africa that we don’t see, unfolding through all the difficulties of our time, like a quiet miracle. Infect the world with your light. Press forward the human genius. Our future is greater than our past. Bless you all.
Extracts from Wikipedia
Ben Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Okri is considered one of the foremost African authors in the post-modern and post-colonial traditions and has been compared favorably with authors such as Salman Rushdie and Gabriel Garcia Márquez..
His father Silver moved his family to London when Okri was less than two years old so that Silver could study law. Okri thus spent his earliest years in London, and attended primary school in Peckham. In 1968 Silver moved his family back to Nigeria where he practiced law in Lagos, providing free or discounted services for those who could not afford it. Ben Okri’s exposure to the Nigerian civil war and a culture in which his peers saw visions of spirits at this time later provided inspiration for Okri’s fiction.
At the age of 14 Okri claimed to have had a revelation that poetry was his chosen calling. He began writing articles on social and political issues, but these never found a publisher. He then wrote short stories based on those articles, and some were published in women’s journals and evening papers. Okri claimed that his criticism of the government in some of this early work led to his name being placed on a death list, and necessitated his departure from the country. In the late 1970s, Okri moved back to England to study comparative literature at Essex University with a grant from the Nigerian government. But when funding for his scholarship fell through, Okri found himself homeless, sometimes living in parks and sometimes with friends. He describes this experience as “very, very important” to his work: “I wrote and wrote in that period… If anything [the desire to write] actually intensified.”
Okri’s success as a writer began when he published his first novel Flowers and Shadows at the age of 21. His reputation as an author was secured when he won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road
Okri’s work is particularly difficult to categorize.
Okri has described his work as influenced as much by the philosophical texts in his father’s book shelves as it was by literature,and Okri cites the influence of both Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne on his A Time for New Dreams. Critics have noted the close relationship between Blake and Okri’s poetry.
Okri is also influenced by the oral tradition of his people, and particularly his mother’s storytelling: “If my mother wanted to make a point, she wouldn’t correct me, she’d tell me a story.”
A contemporary folk band from Galway called Fling are performing for students of Music at my school. Music teacher, Kamilla Carstensen, has invited other teachers, with their classes too, so I’ve brought my third-year class along with me and have asked them to write a review.
During one of the discussion breaks Peter Bögsted, another Music teacher, announces where his class, 2A, will be going on their study trip in September: Ireland.
“Well,” say the band members, “you should come to Galway then.”
And so it is agreed.
This sounds like my kind of trip. I’m a fan of folk music, and I’m really into Fling’s performance. But it’s a pipe dream. There are two colleagues up for it, a reserve in the wings apparently, and it isn’t even my class.
Tuesday 25th March
One of my students, Dorthe Lodberg, has written a review of the concert that I think is worthy of publication:
Fresh, Festive, Formidable – Fling
One cold, grey Thursday morning towards the end of January a small crowd of Danish students of A-level Music are gathered in the concert hall of their school, Esbjerg Gymnasium & HF, to hear the Irish contemporary folk band, Fling, give a delightful, moving and intimate concert.
The five musicians fling themselves into the concert with the sort of enthusiasm that would seem to be the special reserve of those who play music because not to do so would be unimaginable. They are eminently professional, both inspiring and yet very real and down to earth.
With Liam Carroll (lead vocalist, guitar, octave mandolin and harmonica), Maeve Kelly (lead vocalist, feadóg, low whistle, harmonica, octave mandolin), Liam Conway (banjo, mandolin, octave mandolin and vocals), Pauli Smalls (bass guitar) and Ade Alkin (traditional drum-set supplemented with a bodhrán), the recipe consists of the time-honoured ingredients of humour, spontaneity, musical skill, and a knowledge of and a passion for music, and the dishes they serve are colourful, vibrant and velvety tunes on no less than ten different musical instruments, with polyphonic singing at regular intervals.
This melting pot of musicians from different backgrounds, and with various talents and interests, joined forces a year and a half ago, and they are keeping Irish history and tradition alive by playing and singing in very traditional Celtic and Irish-English strains, and yet simultaneously incorporating more modern features that ensure their brand of music is up-to-date. Their own diverse musical backgrounds are conducive to this approach, but the natural development of Irish folk music has also been to immerse itself in the cultures in which it has found itself, and here the cross-fertilisation of the American Irish returning to Ireland before embarking on a new wave of emigration is particularly characteristic. The strains of bluegrass and Cajun are unmistakably part and parcel of contemporary Irish folk, and yet the sound of the Irish accent is so original, unique, refreshing and charming that the audience is spellbound by it. As Maeve Kelly explains: “In Ireland there’s a strong history of storytelling – especially through poems and songs.” And when Fling perform a traditional sad Irish song such as “Shady Grove” with an upbeat Cajun flavour, and a light tune like “Ballyshannon Bends” with a mix of bluegrass and humour, this heritage would seem to be as alive and kicking as ever. This latter tune is one of several that accelerates as it progresses, and at its fastest the eye has difficulty following the banjo player’s and whistle player’s fingers, having to settle instead for the bounciness of Pauli Smalls’ hair.
It is not only the range of Fling’s musical virtuosity that entertains and impresses the students, but also their evident willingness to impart knowledge. Twice the lights come on as they sit down at the front of the stage and answer as many questions as the students can muster.
This is a pleasant and refreshing learning experience. It’s a cold winter day here in Denmark, but for a couple of hours Fling have us dancing on a 560-kilometre trip across the North Sea to a traditional Irish pub and the milder climes of Galway.
I send it to Maeve Kelly via Facebook.
Tuesday 19th June
My wife and I are out at our caravan in Blaavand. Even though there’s more than a week left of oral exams, my duties are over, and I’m looking forward to some time off before the graduation ball, graduation ceremony and summer party at the school.
I’ve just returned from relaxing at the wellness centre, when my principal rings me up. From previous experience I take this to mean bad news; he’s going to ask me to fill in for a sick colleague. So I take the call with some foreboding.
“Hello.”
“Hello, Duncan. Erling Petersson here”
“Hello, Erling.”
“I’m just calling to ask you if you would like to go to Ireland with 3A in September.”
“Well… (brief pause – purely for decency’s sake) …yes, I’d like that very much.”
Usually a class has the same English teacher for all three years. Occasionally, however, there are circumstances that make it impossible. I did know I’d be teaching 3A English next year. And if I’d thought about it, I’d have figured my chances of going on that trip had thus increased dramatically, but it’s not something I’ve given any thought at all.
The teacher I’m replacing – not their Music teacher, Peter, but another colleague – has been invited to teach on a teacher’s training course during the week in question. As that’s something he’d very much like to do, and as he’ll only be teaching twelve of the thirty students next year, he decided to approach the principal on the matter.
It’s a huge, brilliant surprise. An early birthday present.
Friday 22nd June
To celebrate my 50th birthday I go and hear Peter Bögsted and his band, 21st Blues, perform at Underground in Esbjerg. He’s hired blues icon, Kenn Lending, for the evening, and we are treated to some monstrously brilliant blues. Ten other colleagues come along for the ride.
Thursday 28th June
It turns out that the guy who arranges Fling’s concerts in Denmark, Claus Hebor, has organized the whole trip – four nights in Galway with various events through Fling’s connections there (including a gig on the final night at Monroe’s, where the students will be warming up for Fling), and three nights in Dublin. Not only that, but Claus will be joining us. Although he’s been to Ireland countless times before, he’s never actually been to Galway.
There are no special events planned for Dublin. Not yet, that is. I have a great contact there from my very first visit there three years ago. Here is my “Dublin Memoir”, published in Anglo Files, #156, the journal of DATE (The Danish Association of Teachers of English):
MONDAY 14th September 2009: On our return to the hostel after Day One in Dublin with 3E I borrow my colleague, Gitte’s, computer and discover that the organiser of The Glór Sessions (Music & Poetry), Stephen James Smith, has replied to the e-mail I sent him before I left. He wants me to come to The International Bar at 9pm to recite a couple of poems and sing a song.
I’ve told my students I might be doing so, and they want to be there, so I send one of them a text. Also staying in the hostel is another class from our school. I taught them in their first year, and they want to come along too. They’re studying A-level Music and have just gone out on the Musical Pub Crawl. So I send one of their two teachers, Birgitte, a text too.
In the course of the day I have located an Indian restaurant on Parliament Street called A Taste of India, so Gitte and I go for a meal there. The food is so delicious it’s difficult not to tarry, but a text from Birgitte – “Where are you?” – goads us into action. We scamper up to Wicklow St. and find that the cosy wee bar downstairs is already occupied by a large number of our students. As I make the acquaintance of Stephen and a fellow called Danny Kelleher, many more of the students come tumbling in.
“Are they all with you?” Stephen asks. “Yes,” I say, wondering if it’s not a bit of an imposition.
But Stephen quickly puts my fears to rest. Eying some good business for the pub, he suggests I appear in the second half. I warn him that the students might get restless, so he decides to put me on earlier.
It’s now 9.40, and the bar is filled to bursting point. Stephen assures the crowd that their teacher will be coming on soon, appeals for quiet (which, bar one lively conversation that he has to douse, is respected), and kicks the evening off with a fine recitation of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played ‘Waltzing Matilda’”, thus serving me, coming on fourth, with an intro to my opening piece, as it was also written by a Scot (me) and it too has a main character who loses both his legs, “funnily enough”. Mine due to alcoholism rather than war. It’s “The Dipsomaniac“. In the tradition of presenting the work of others I then sing Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”, without accompaniment, much to the delight, it turns out later, of a literary type called Peter Conway. Now it’s time to borrow Stephen’s guitar.
It’s a new experience for me to hear an audience clap when I present one of my songs. A good one, I find. And it turns out the students know the chorus rather well. I suspect it’s the Musical Pub Crawl contingent that’s on song. I haven’t prepared an encore, but the students start singing the chorus of another of my songs, “Who Needs an Easy Love?“, and although I haven’t performed it for over a year, they won’t let me off the hook. I appeal to Stephen, but suddenly he’s on their side. It’s like playing away in front of a home crowd. The chorus works well at least. Stephen then invites the students to perform something, so two of them do a number by a Danish pop singer, Thomas Helmig.
Most of the students stay on till the end of the long first half. Worthy of mention is Danny, whose set with guitar is very fluent and lyrical. He reminds me a bit of Al Stewart. After the break comes the main act, a series of very compelling and very literary poems by Raven. He moved here from San Francisco four years ago and now runs Rá, Ireland’s premier performance poetry event. After his first piece a handful of students make a discreet exit. And I don’t blame them. This isn’t easy listening. Later on, a new star is discovered in Andy Delamere, a huge talent guitar-wise.
Two of the students, Frederik Dalgas Jensen and Jonas Oldenburg, are still with me at 1am when the hard core are out on the street saying goodbye to each other.
Stephen collars Andy. He wants him back another evening soon.
I want to come back again soon too.
I’ve kept in touch with Stephen on Facebook ever since, and I’ve been a big fan of one project of his especially, viz. a collaboration with Enda Reilly where they sing and recite Irish poems and songs simultaneously, and which has resulted in the album, Arise and Go. So I contact him and ask if we can do a gig with him and Enda, and he says he’d like to do that.
Thursday 6th September
Stephen has fixed up a gig for us with him and Enda at the International Bar on the 21st. That’s going to be fun.
In the evening I go to hear Fling playing at Turisthotellet in Oksböl ten miles north-west of where I live in Hjerting. With me are my wife, my brother-in-law, Anders, and my neighbour and English teacher colleague, Guri. Another English teacher colleague, Heidi, and her husband, Jesper, who live in Oksböl, come along too. Guri and Heidi are both folk music aficionados, and they give Fling a very enthusiastic thumbs-up.
It’s here that I meet Claus for the first time. He’s very taken with the crazy dance I perform to the final encore, “Triptych“, and he says he’s looking forward to having me as a travelling companion in Ireland. I meet his wife, Helle, and it turns out that she’ll be joining us. She reveals that she’s a nurse, which is an extra blessing.
As for the students, well, they’re a bright, friendly, sociable bunch. There are 17 lassies and 13 lads, and they seem harmonious. So things look very promising. I’ve only had four classes with them, and I’m still struggling to remember a couple of their names, but, as I say to Maeve:
“At least I’ll know their names when we come back.”
I’ve given them a crash course in Irish literature, where they’ve read Colm Tóibín’s short story, “The Empty Family”, as well as John Millington Synge’s short play, “Riders to the Sea”. In addition they each have to give an oral presentation of a section of Xenophobe’s Guide to the Irish by Frank McNally (2008). It’s here that they are introduced to the concept of the craic.
Thursday 13th September
I’m looking on the Internet to see what’ll be happening in Galway and Dublin while we’re over. There’s a singer/songwriter from Galway, Miriam Donohue, whose song, “Street Car”, I like. She sounds like Joni Mitchell, Dido, and Suzanne Vega rolled into one. I can see on Facebook she’s just finished a year at the Galway Access Music Project, which we’re going to be sampling for a day. I contact her on Facebook to hear if we can see her in Galway, but she tells me she’ll be out of town.
Sunday 16th September
We set off from the school at 5.30 am on a coach bound for Hamburg. From here we fly to Dublin. We’re then whisked away by coach to Galway. It all goes off without a hitch, under the expert stage-management of Claus. Usually on a study trip the teachers have to take care of all the logistics, so to have Claus doing that for us is a great boon.
We arrive in Ireland’s musical Mecca at two in the afternoon. We’re staying at Barnacles Quay Street House Hostel on the pedestrian precinct at the lower end of the main street in the centre of town
photo, Peter Bögsted
overlooking a pub called The Quays. The weather’s turned nice, and the street is swamped with people. But they seem happy enough, and there’s a mellow and friendly atmosphere that’s infectious.
A few buskers brave the flood. photo, Mads Joakim
I have some time to explore a bit on my own before we go out together later. I seek out a quiet spot by the River Corrib and watch it flow.
In the early evening, at Claus’ recommendation, Peter and I go to have fish and chips at McDonagh’s, where we run into a gaggle of our students. Afterwards we all head up into town to sample some beer and live music. Our first stop is Taaffes, and Peter and I decided to taste the local brew, Galway Hooker, whose name derives from the name of the traditional fishing boat used in Galway Bay.
“I’d like two Galway Hookers,” I tell the barman.
“For how long?” he replies, to much merriment at the bar.
“Oh, twenty minutes, a half hour.”
It’s a nice, fresh, hoppy, fruity ale, not all that unlike some of the ales brewed by small breweries in Denmark. We let some of the students have a snifter. A few other students have carried on chatting with some guys at the bar, and as we pass on our way back out, I hear this Irish guy proudly rattling off a long list of Danish footballers. We go over the road to Tig Cóilí, where a session is in full swing:
photo, Peter Bögsted
It’s not until the next day that we realise the man in the middle on accordion is Anders Traberg, a Danish guy Peter is intent on tracking down after hearing about him from Peter Uhrbrandt, a fiddler on Fanö. The woman opposite Anders is probably his Japanese wife. I say “probably” because the next day we hear another session with him at Tig Cóilí, where he’s accompanied by no less than three female Japanese fiddlers. They are all accomplished, and the music is upbeat. It’s jolly music, and yet not silly in any way. Here’s an article from the Galway Advertiser about Anders.
Claus has informed us that Liam Carroll will be playing at The Merry Fiddler Bar after 9, so a large group of us make our way there later on. Claus and Helle are already there. Liam is playing second fiddle to Ollie, but at one point he is given a twenty-minute set on his own with guitar, harp (i.e. mouth organ) and song, which is a treat. He starts with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”. Fling play it too, but I’d go for his solo version any time.
Maeve and Pauli turn up later, and I go with them down to Roisin Dubh. Liam Conway turns up, as does another bass player Pauli has played with. The other Liam is turned away at the door, which closes long before the pub is emptied.
After kicking-out time the others go on to a night club. I’ve had an early start (3.45 am Irish time) and sense it’s time to find my bed.
Monday 17th September
We attend the Galway Access Music Project to receive some professional music training. It begins to spit as we wait outside.
photo, Peter Bögsted
But when the spit turns to rain we are let inside.
Cormac Dunne, who was in the original line-up of The Stunning, teaches us some percussion:
photo, Peter Bögsted
Then Michael Durham (a Canadian woman) gives us some voice training:
photo, Peter Bögsted
photo, Peter Bögsted
That’s me in the background offering Maeve a remedy for a hangover – ten drops of Japanese peppermint oil in a pint of water.
Sandwiches and tea or coffee are laid on for lunch, and then Caroline and Colin from a band called Queen Elvis give us a workshop in songwriting:
photo, Peter Bögsted
The students are very well-behaved and attentive throughout, and they seem genuinely grateful. Which is something Maeve marvels at.
“Irish teenagers,” she says, “are terrible louts.”
I don’t dare mention that this class has the reputation for being one of the rowdiest in our school.
Maeve then takes Peter, Claus and me down to a pub called Tigh Neachtains (Naughtons). It’s a mere waddle from the hostel, and here we can sup Bonaparte, a beer that tastes as Guinness used to before it was made milder in order to satisfy a wider, and younger, segment of the population. The fire is lit in one of the small bars inside, and we get cosy. Maeve introduces us to someone called Tim. He doesn’t join in the conversation though. Later, when the sun’s come out and I’m sitting outside smoking, I see him leaving, and I call out:
“See ya, Tim!”
Tim turns around, startled, then comes and sits next to me. We swap some anecdotes, and he ends up staying for another hour and buying me a Bonaparte. That’s Galwegian and Irish hospitality for you. Even though Tim’s originally from Australia. In the meantime Pauli has emerged into the day, and he joins us. Later he calls out to a guy walking by with a pram, and soon we’re talking to Sean, a primary-school teacher.
“Do you play music?” I ask him.
“No.”
“Can I have your autograph?”
Helle has also turned up at Naughtons, and she, Claus, Pauli and I go up to Tig Cóilí, where Anders Traberg is playing again. I do a wee dance (for the benefit of Claus perhaps) only to be joined by two ladies who want to do a more traditional dance, with all that overarm/underarm stuff. I oblige them, but sit myself firmly down when the piece is over.
Dusk has fallen, and buskers have started playing loud, amplified music on the emptied streets, one every forty yards. At Vina Mara I find some very good food quite cheap and served with startling speed. It’s almost as if they know I’m itching to get back to the live music scene. Anders is playing another session at Taaffes, but I wander back into Tig Cóilí to hear a singer on guitar, where I chat with Claus and a couple of the students, Christian Albertsen and Katrine Buur.
Tuesday 18th September
Claus has hired a coach, and we pick up Liam Carroll on our way out of town. As well as being a talented singer and musician, Liam is also a professional photographer, and the students have been advised that he’ll be on hand to give them some useful tips. He also lends them his tripod. We drive north to the picturesque bog, loughs and mountains of Connemara. Here’s a picture that Liam took in Connemara in June 2011:
Connemara photo, Liam Carroll
Today the weather’s better, thankfully. We’re treated to a couple of rainbows – “Double ones?” I’m asked twice later on, but no, they aren’t – which then dissolve in blue skies and sunshine.
photo, Sara Möller Larsen
The present header on this blog is also taken at this spot – by Mads Joakim. It’s his first-ever attempt at a panorama shot. He calls it “Connemara Panorama”.
After a good lunch in Clifden we drive west up along the Sky Road, with its impressive views of the coast:
photo, Mads Joakim
Katrine Buur photo, Mia Maja Mortensen
Later we stop close to Kylemore Abbey, a romantic castle in a superb setting, i.e. a mountain behind and a loch before.
Later we have a 20-minute leg-stretch down the road.
We only have an hour back in Galway before we’re back on the coach again and off to see some hurling at Castlegar Gaelic Athletic Association. Mike Connolly shows us the ropes and lets the students have a few attempts picking up the sliotar with the hurley and hitting it. And then we watch an hour of hurling. We’re then ushered inside for tea, coffee, sandwiches, cakes and biscuits. Hurling’s big over here. Many of the cars are sporting flags with the colours of the local team, as they’re up against favourites Kilkenny in the All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship final replay taking place in Croke Park in Dublin on Sunday 30th September. Because they drew last time, people now fancy their chances, which I always think is a case of over-optimism, but good luck to them anyway.
Back in town I saunter up to The Merry Fiddler along with Christian and Jonas Memborg to hear Liam Carroll playing again. He’s on his own this evening, although a chum, Adrian Keenan, is on hand with some harmonies. Claus and Helle turn up a bit later. Apart from us (at the table of honour) there are only a few old boys sitting at the bar. Again he starts with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”. It would seem to be his signature song at the moment. Though it’s in close competition with another Dylan song he does: “Girl from the North Country”. This video on You Tube gives an idea of his performance of it. We’re treated to many more fine songs accompanied by lovely guitar and harp. There’s no chat to distract from the music, just some banter in between numbers. I let it fall that I also sing a bit, so Liam insists I take a turn. He’s got 17 different harps, but none in G.
“I just use C for G,” he says.
Well, maybe so, Liam, but I’m not about to try that out off the cuff. Nice guitar though. I do “Suzanne”, “On Fanö”, and “Streets of Gold”, and they go down pretty well. It’s a pleasure to play for people who are listening.
Afterwards we sit round with our pints of Guinness, just watching it settle. Poetry in motion. Then the chat becomes philosophical. I’m told about the ancient site of Newgrange, north of Dublin, a tomb that’s older than Stonehenge and whose passage and chamber are illuminated by the winter solstice sun. I tell a creation myth about Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia resembling the figure of a man and the Americas that of a woman. Then the pub closes, and it’s time to go home.
Wednesday 19th September
Peter and I go into town for breakfast, as the bread and coffee at the hostel aren’t all that brilliant. (The showers also leave something to be desired – a button in the wall activates fifteen seconds of lukewarm water that remains on the linoleum floor, and if I close the shower curtain there’s no room for me in the shower.) Our meal is interrupted by a lady who says she’s fascinated by the way we’re talking about music, and before long we’re talking about intuition and spirituality, and then she’s talking about how Christ guides her through life.
We head back to the hostel to see whether any of the students require help with their projects. Not as such. But one or two of them are tinkling a bit on the guitar provided in the common room – now there’s a nice touch. I find a computer, and via Facebook I tell Stephen we’re on our way to Dublin tomorrow.
Peter and I decide to go shopping. We go into a music shop, the Four Corners. In the Irish folk music section I pick out Sail On by Dick Gaughan. Have they adopted him or what? He’s normally perceived as being Scottish. It turns out his father was Irish. Here’s him singing a lovely song, Song for Ireland (which was written by an English couple). The Scots and the Irish have a common aesthetic. Dougie MacLean’s “Caledonia”, for example, is a very popular song over here. In this performance of the song Dougie actually quips that the Irish think it’s theirs. There’s some truth in this. Even Liam says he’s never heard of Dougie MacLean.
Stephen calls me on my mobile and tells me he’s e-mailed me a couple of choruses he wants us to learn before our gig at the International on Friday. He also urges me to eat fish and chips at McDonagh’s and go to Roisin Dubh. I assure him that these are places that were drawn to my attention from the off. We are in good hands.
Smoking outside Tig Cóilíin, I start conversing with a guy who is a part-time farmer and a part-time musician. He wants to write his own songs, but he’s having trouble with that. So we chat a bit about writing songs.
Peter turns up, and my new acquaintance makes himself scarce – he’s off to write a song or two, he says. Peter has bought himself a brown tweed cap. I left my hat behind at the school, and I decide I want a hat of sorts too. I’ve never been a patient shopper, and within seconds of entering Fallers Sweater Shop I’ve decided upon a black hat with “Guinness” on it. Then we head off to McDonagh’s for some lunch.
There are no events scheduled for the afternoon as two-thirds of the students are performing in the evening. If they want something to do, then there’s the free guided tour of the town. Four of the lads go off to get tattoos done as a memento of their visit. Although it’s a fair walk, Peter and I decide to go and kick the wall as that’s something you do apparently when you’re in Galway. However, we run into Maeve outside Naughtons and barge in on her rendez-vous with Helle there. I tell Maeve once again that I think the day at the Access Music Project was a great success, and I praise the scheduling of the three different classes.
“Though thinking about it,” I say, “it would have been even better if we’d finished off with a class on dancing. When I told Liam that last night, he said he’d organized some dancers for the gig tonight, and he wondered whether they might show the students some steps.”
“What?” says Maeve. “Liam organize some dancers? I’ll fall over if that happens!! That man couldn’t organize his way out of a wet paper bag!”
We subsequently discuss star signs, and it transpires that Pauli and I share the same date of birth.
Maeve and Helle are going for a walk up the river to the University, and Peter and I invite ourselves along. Maeve is an excellent tour guide, telling us all the stories about the river, the nuns on the island, and the cathedral that was a prison not too long ago. The University is a charming mix of old and new, and there are students everywhere. Maeve knows a lot about it as she herself studied here, and it’s a trip down memory lane for her. We hear some apocryphal stories too, like the one about the lawn that no student dare cross as superstition says you’ll then fail your exams. Now that’s a clever way to keep people off the grass. The noisy canteen makes her especially nostalgic. I find myself thinking that we should have brought the students up here. After all, it’s places like these many of them will soon want to be heading.
Down at sea-level again, Maeve goes to move her car as her parking time’s expired, and Peter and I wait for her in The Crane Bar. She never does turn up, not that this worries us too much. We’re confident she’s all right, and the Guinness is good, as is the company. We meet some locals as well as some Swedish visitors. There’s one lassie here who was at Naughtons earlier. I tell her she should come to Monroe’s this evening seeing as all good things come in threes.
I then go to Joyce Book Store and buy some books. One of them is Waking Up in Dublin: A Musical Tour of the Celtic Capital by Neil Hegarty from 2004.
Monroe’s Live is busy when I arrive at 9.30. The students have been campaigning too.
Peter Bögsted presents his students and thanks Monroe’s, Fling, and Claus.
And then they’re underway.
Accordian Swing and the Funkadelic Two (aka. Benjamin Kodböl, Christian Albertsen, and Frederik Mols) kick off with some traditional folk music: “Holevvalsen”, “8-mands Reel” and “Forlovelses Reihnlaender”. Then Inaluk Berthelsen, Kira Lyberth, Maria Thomassen, Mette Hansen, and Sabine Henriksen do ”Gatekeeper” (by Feist).
There’s some trouble with the sound, but the students acquit themselves admirably nonetheless.
Emma Gjörding and Anna Halkjaer perform two of their own songs, “Tears me Apart” and “Wine”, as well as a Tina Dico number, “Room with a View”.
Emma Gjörding and Anna Halkjaer photo, Mads Joakim
Then Mads Joakim, Mikkel Hintz, Max Uldahl and Rikke Andersen perform “Set Fire to the Rain” (by Adele) and “Tomgang” (by Shaka Loveless).
The students’ performances are going down well, though there is quite a bit of chatter at the back of the hall.
Then Kasper Rask, Mads Joakim, Max Uhldahl, Mikkel Hintz, and Simon Nielsen perform a Danish rap number, “Kosmisk Kaos” (by Malk de Koijn). The hall falls silent, and mouths fall open. Never have they witnessed anything quite like this.
Finally Emilie Marie Nielsen, Frederik Mols, Jeppe Schack, Jakob Horsböl, and Mads Höjer perform a couple of Toto numbers, “Georgy Porgy” and “Baby He’s Your Man”:
Jeppe Schack and Mads Höjer
Mads’ tattoo photo, Mads Höjer
Emilie Marie Nielsen
Jakob Horsböl
Frederik Mols
Jeppe Schack, Mads Höjer and Emilie Marie Nielsen
That’s twenty of the thirty students who’ve been up performing. There are several reasons why the remainder aren’t performing. For some of them their preferred genres wouldn’t be apt here, and for others their preferred instruments are not available.
Some of the students are a bit miffed that the monitors weren’t working at all well, but Peter brushes it aside as a healthy learning experience. As Maeve notes a couple of times in my hearing, the sound system at our gymnasium is on a par with those of the very best venues in Ireland. So, yes, the students are used to better things.
When I go out for a smoke in the break, I find that my Guinness hat has been lifted. Some things are just not meant to be.
Now Fling come on, and it’s soon clear they are in great form. They’ve settled with a permanent drummer now, Gerard Flynn, and their performance is much sharper and yet even freer than in the two previous concerts I’ve attended. There’s a great dynamic at play, and they have a wonderfully fluent, happy energy:
Fling at Monroe’s
Maeve Kelly and Liam Carroll
Pauli Smalls, Maeve Kelly, Liam Carroll and Liam Conway
And then, shock of all shocks (for Maeve anyway): Liam introduces the two smartly-dressed youngsters standing behind me at the bar as Irish dancers, and they come up and give a spirited performance.
This apparently inspires the students. When the music resumes I’ve hardly started one of my crazy flings before I’m engulfed by energetic youngsters. No matter. I’m content to collapse beside Claus on one of the two huge white sofas close to the stage and let the young ones do their stuff.
Then Fling dedicate their version of a Waterboys number, “Fisherman’s Blues”, to Claus, who is an avid fan of theirs. In 1988 the band’s founder, Mike Scott, lacked inspiration while recording the album, Fisherman’s Blues, and came to Galway for a break. He was invited to a session at Tigh Hughes in Spiddal, twelve miles west of Galway, and ended up finishing recording the album there. Then Sharon Shannon came along with her accordion, and he stayed on for several years.
I’m so sunk in the sofa that when Liam calls me up to do a number I’m too slow to emerge, and another singer is called onto the stage instead. I catch Liam and ask him if there’s time for a short number. He says okay, and he lends me his harp holder. It’s a lovely harp holder. It doesn’t slip and yet it sits comfortably. It feels like I’ve been driving an Audi for 25 years and now suddenly I’m sitting at the wheel of a BMW. I’ve got my G harp with me this time, and I get up there and do “Streets of Gold”, the piece of mine that has harvested most accolades this summer, before collapsing on the sofa again in a pile of coats and Claus.
The concert goes on to new heights of frenzy, both on the stage and on the dance floor. When I give Liam a hug at the end, I find his t-shirt is soaked through. I tell him about my experience with his harp holder, and he tells me where he bought it – at the shop I was in with Peter earlier today.
“What kind is it?” I ask him.
“It’s a black one,” he says helpfully. “About 40 euros – double the price of the normal ones.”
I confront Pauli with the news that we have the same date of birth, and he’s kind enough to express delight. I’ve forgotten to get myself a drink for the past hour though, and suddenly the bar’s closed, and it’s too late for Roisin Dubh as well. Oh well, moderation can be a good thing.
Thursday 20th September
In the morning I go to the Four Corners again, this time to buy a harp holder, but I’m told their retailer has gone out of business and they’ve run out. Not promising. Is this the economic downturn we’ve heard so much about? I try another music shop. No harp holders. Wow! A dearth of harp holders. It’s no real problem personally as I’ve got one that works. I just hope no one else desperately needs one.
I collect my case and rucksack from my room – all named after writers, mine being Joyce – and I join the others on the coach at the bottom of the street. Fling aren’t there waving hankies, but I understand.
We head off to Kilbeggan Distillery, Ireland’s oldest, for a guided tour and some whiskey tasting. I like the Connemara cask strength peated single malt.
The precious liquid in store photo, Mads Joakim
Afterwards we have an hour to walk about, buy whiskey, eat lunch, whatever, and I find my feet taking me into town. The first two pubs have closed down – not shut but closed down. More signs of the recession. But I find The Saddler’s Inn and a pint of Guinness, and I send texts to family, friends and colleagues in Scotland, England and Denmark. The modern equivalent of the postcard. I tell them where I am, a bit about what I’m doing, and finish with an aphorism that I’ve just seen in the canteen at the distillery: “A balanced diet is a cake in each hand.” Rather apposite halfway between Galway and Dublin.
Back on the coach we get round to learning the two choruses for the gig tomorrow. The first one is easy – “Wild Mountain Thyme”, or as it’s known in Scotland, “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?” – and Claus has a live recording by Fling with Liam teaching the audience the words:
And we’ll all go together
to pluck wild mountain thyme
all around the blooming heather.
Will ye go, lassie, go?
From Bantry Bay up to Derry Quay
and from Galway to Dublin Town
no maid I’ve seen like the sweet colleen
that I met in the County Down.
Claus finds a couple of recordings of this, but neither of these tries to teach the audience the chorus. And I’m not convinced the students have a grip on it. (I’m not even convinced I have a grip on it.)
We arrive in Dublin notwithstanding and subsequently make our way up to the Barnacles Hostel, right next to Temple Bar. My room here is plush compared to my room in Galway. It’s roomier for a start, and the floor has a carpet instead of linoleum. The shower isn’t anything very special in itself, but in comparison to the one in Galway it’s utterly fantastic.
I’ve arranged to meet Claus and Helle at O’Neill’s. It’s a big pub, but they easily find me sitting in the covered smoking area. From there we go to the smallest pub in Dublin, Dawson’s Lounge. Peter joins us there – a giant in a hobbit hole – and before long we go for a delicious Indian meal at Diwali in South Great George’s Street. Claus points out a good music shop almost next door, and then he, Helle, and I go in search of some live music. We soon find some at Sweeney’s. It’s not exactly folk. In fact it’s rock. But some variation in one’s diet is a good thing I’m told.
Friday 21st September
In the morning we take the bus to Kilmainham Gaol and enjoy the guided tour that doubles as a refresher course in Irish history, at the price of only 2 euros per student.
In the afternoon I go to the music shop, and – it’s inevitable really – they have no harp holders in stock.
Our two-hour gig with Stephen James Smith and Enda Reilly downstairs at The International Bar starts at 4pm. I run into Enda at 3.45, and it’s not long before Stephen turns up and buys me a pint. That man knows the way to a Scotsman’s heart. Stephen and I agree to break it up into mini-sets, with him and Enda on for 15 minutes and then us for 10-15 minutes and so on. It’s quite a different setting from the gig at Monroe’s two days ago. It’s purely acoustic, and although the event is open to the public, there aren’t many others besides us. Nevertheless, the fact that it’s open to the public means a lot for the atmosphere. And the lucky punters who turn up while the gig’s underway go nowhere fast.
Stephen’s a very mellow and friendly guy, and yet he’s very outgoing too, and he soon has the students spellbound. Enda enchants us as well with his sweet voice and brilliant guitar play. Together they have a very versatile repertoire, ranging as it does from the gruff stand-up-cum-slam-style poetry that Stephen excels in to the melodious, lyrical music and song that Enda masters. And when they meet in the middle – in these wonderful duets they have recorded on Arise and Go – the angels are winking.
The poem that started it all off for them a few years back was W.B. Yeats’ “September 1913”. Here’s the video they subsequently made of it in The International Bar:
Here’s The Waterboys’ version from 2011:
In this video Mike Scott says: “Taking Yeats’ work and presenting it in such a new way is a radical artistic step.” Fair enough, but I can’t help but wonder about a couple of things. First of all, isn’t this normally the kind of statement one leaves to the marketing people or the reviewers? And secondly, weren’t Stephen and Enda doing this before The Waterboys?
I quiz Stephen over this, and he digs this up:
In other words, The Waterboys started putting Yeats’ poetry to music 24 years ago.
Another Yeats poem performed by both Smith/Reilly and The Waterboys is “Lake Isle of Innisfree”.
Here’s The Waterboys’ version:
To me the tone of this seems directed by Yeats’ recorded recital (click on the page), which I would say is a very good example of the poet not always being the best person to perform the work. The Smith/Reilly version, on the other hand, is both original and uplifting.
Another song/poem Stephen and Enda perform from their album is “Raglan Road”, the first verse of which we sang with Michael Durham in Galway. Here’s the text.
For our part we start aptly with “Gatekeeper” by Inaluk & co., followed by Emma and Anna doing “Wine”, “Tears me Apart”, “Room with a View”, and “On his Knees” (by Ida Gard).
Before the gig Stephen has warned the girls about the barman, Kenny Whelan, being quite a ladies’ man. Now Stephen declares that Kenny has lost his heart.
At one point Enda performs a couple of showman pieces with a double capo, and the students love it. Then Stephen recites “The Gardener”, a poem on Arise and Go, which turns out to be a moving tribute to the narrator’s mother. He’ll be reciting it in a couple of hours on national radio.
The Danish rappers aren’t intending to do their piece, but they’re so comfortable with this scene that they make a go for it, and with Stephen providing the beat with his bhodrán they accomplish it in style.
Rikke & co. “Set Fire to the Rain”, and Anna also sings one of her own songs, “Fickle Heart”, which has Stephen all happy.
When Stephen asks if there are any others amongst us who want to perform and no one responds, I grab my trusty old harp holder and step up to perform “Streets of Gold”. I fluff the words of the first verse dreadfully, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt this summer it’s Jayne Osborn’s great piece of advice: “Don’t grimace. Just carry on as if everything’s fine.” And when I ask people about it afterwards, no one seems to have noticed.
And of course we’re also treated to “Wild Mountain Thyme” and “The Star of the County Down”, audience participation and all.
The last number Stephen and Enda play is the wonderful gospel number, “Down in the River to Pray”, made famous by the Coen brothers’ film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Now if they’d told us they were going to do that, we’d have come all prepared with the a capella accompaniment. Everyone’s delighted with the level of intensity and involvement shown at the gig, and Stephen and Enda are no less amazed than Maeve at the students’ general good behaviour.
Afterwards we’re served stew, or soup and sandwiches, as well as tea or coffee, and soon we find ourselves in the middle of a new scene taking place in the bar. Two Swedes have booked the Irish Music Bar Tour, represented this evening by Martin on uilleann pipes and Maurice on accordion. A few of us follow them on to The Stag’s Head, and Martin has reserved the table of honour for us there. We return to the International as Stephen has recommended the musician playing tonight, Andy Earley. And Stephen himself is back, accompanying him on bodhrán.
And who should come piling in half an hour later but the rest of the students. Nice one, folks! I turn round and see Stephen beaming freely. At one point Andy does a Neil Young number, and when I start playing harp, Stephen offers me his mic.
When that scene’s over, Stephen takes us down to Oliver St. John’s Gogarty’s, where there’s more live folk music.
Saturday 22nd September
I enjoy a bit of a lie-in the next morning, and while Peter takes the students to the Guinness Storehouse, I toddle up a very busy and sunshiny Grafton Street, buy some coffee and sandwiches and go and mill around on St. Stephen’s Green. Then I walk around the railings outside viewing the paintings hanging there. Later I find a bookshop that’s closing down and buy a few books, most notably In Search of the Craic: One man’s pub crawl through Irish music by Colin Irwin. The 2010 Foreword is written by Moya Brennan of Clannad. She learnt her music in her dad’s pub, Leo’s Tavern in Donegal, and it worries her that so many pubs are closing down as they are often the heart of the community:
The Celtic Tiger brought wealth and economic stature to an unprepared nation. Much of it was good, but in attempting to play its part on the post-modern European and world stage, the government introduced measures which have contributed to the serious demise of pubs across Ireland and, in many areas of the country, a cultural void that threatens the community.
The smoking ban, tough drink-driving laws and the banning of under-18s after 9pm are all, on the surface, common sense measures to protect health and well-being. But the Irish are voting with their feet, the pubs are emptying and closing down and, with it, communities are losing their heart. As many as 800 pubs closed across the country between 2007 and 2009.
As a parent I love the idea of my children learning to play in sessions and experiencing the tradition of musical skills being passed from one generation to the next. But I can’t be sure this will continue to happen in the same way as my own youth.
Peter’s been texting me about meeting up in the evening, and shortly before 5 we set out for Davy Byrne’s pub to meet Claus and Helle. We skip Leopold Bloom’s gorgonzola cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy and go straight for the Guinness. I recall that I still haven’t found a hat and resolve to go and buy a green tweed cap, jointly inspired by Peter’s cap and the green colours that Stephen and Enda were wearing yesterday. There are no green ones in House of Ireland, but I see some caps at the back of a small gift shop, the Irish Celtic Store in Nassau Street, and peering down the back of the non-revolving stand I spy one that is green. I feel my choice is blessed when above the counter I spy the famous portrait of James Joyce with his hat on.
The four of us go for a nice, quiet supper at Pyg Cafe at Powerscourt Shopping Centre, after which I go back with Claus and Helle to their hotel north of the river. We look in at The Celt nearby – it’s wall-to-wall drinking, and a look-in’s all we manage. The O’Shea’s Hotel it is then. Claus and I find some seats and listen to some live trad folk.
Sunday 23rd September
At 5 in the morning we’re down at the River Liffey boarding the coach to the airport. We fly to Hamburg and are soon on a coach back home. Again, all without a hitch. Claus offers to drive me home on his and Helle’s way back to Oksböl, and they drop me off just as my wife and our dog are returning from a walk.
In the evening I dig out Dorthe Lodberg’s review and send it to Maeve again. She didn’t see it first time round.
Tuesday 25th September
Maeve says she’ll post the review on Facebook if that’s okay with Dorthe. I tell her it is, as I made sure she was okay about it back in March. I befriend Dorthe on Facebook so I can alert her to her piece appearing, and I learn that she’s now studying journalism at Odense University.
The Waterboys do two reunion gigs in Spiddal, which double as benefit concerts for Strange Boat Donor Foundation, named after the song, “Strange Boat”, on Fisherman’s Blues. Eleanor Shanley released the song as a CD/single in 2008 to raise awareness of the importance of organ donation and to launch the charity, and today she is performing the song with The Waterboys at the concerts. None of her recordings of the song are available free on the Internet, not even on Spotify, which is otherwise a good site as the artists are paid each time their songs are played. Here’s the original version by The Waterboys anyway:
There are also several good quality videos of single songs from the concerts on You Tube. Here’s one:
And of course:
And this must be for Peter:
And here are some more:
Sunday 30th September
I tell Maeve I’m going to include Dorthe’s piece in a blog post about our trip, and she’s happy she can just link to it.
Galway lose 11-22 to Kilkenny in the hurling.
In the Ryder Cup the US are looking very likely to win. They are leading 10-6 before the last twelve singles, and they have the home advantage. But Seve Ballesteros works his magic from beyond the grave, and Europe rob them, 14½-13½.
Monday 1st October
Claus tells me he’s booked an event with Stephen and Enda at the International for his next group.
Tuesday 9th October
The students present their projects based on their study trip. With the subjects of Music and English being the points of departure many have chosen to focus on Irish identity through the lenses of the craic and Irish folk music. It’s clear that the fact that they had to do a project has encouraged them to be outward-going in their meeting with the Irish, and this in itself is vindication of the whole project concept. There are a number of excellent aspects in many of the presentations, but there are also several instructive blind spots in both approach and execution. All in all, a great learning experience for everyone involved.
Wednesday 10th October
Peter and I and a few of the students go to Underground to hear Anna perform solo – three sets of forty minutes each. What a huge musical talent! A very impressive performance indeed. She has a wide repertoire of songs interspersed with her own compositions. We should have had her doing a solo gig in Ireland.