You Must Set Forth at Dawn Read Online Free PDF Page B

first guest, an absentee guest and permanent resident. Then the estate came alive, peopled, that one time, by the very creative tribe it was meant to serve. I try to recollect the animated faces and voices . . . the poet and journalist Odia Ofeimun; the critic Biodun Jeyifo; the poet and playwright Femi Osofisan; Tunji Oyelana and Jimi Solanke, musicians and actors; the singer and lifelong collaborator Francesca Emmanuel; Bola Ige, a lawyer and politician but friend of the arts and occasional poet . . . then we formally named a wing for our late friend, slaughtered a goat, and consumed gourdfuls of palm wine and cases of its bottled and labeled expatriate siblings. Celebrating Femi Johnson’s life? Or assuaging our loss yet again? No matter, he was one of us, actor and singer even though a businessman, and we were sealing his present memory into those walls.
    The memories, yes, but the physical casing of the idea? Mentally abandoned—at least, so I continue to hope—flushed into the thin stream that I had widened into an artificial pond, past the catchment groves of repose along the watercourse, now certainly silted up or covered in an oily slick that oozed lazily from that strange soil. I remind myself that I once abandoned even the cactus patch, a bristling phalanx of thorned markers to which I had assigned the role of covering my remains—yes, that was the ultimate proof of my detachment. It was due especially to the dismissal of that last attachment that, faced with the real possibility that I might be killed in exile, I seized greedily on a chance encounter, a revelation, on the island of Jamaica. I imbued the event with a fated dimension, read it as a solemn pronouncement and offering from predecessors to the ancestral realms. Alas, even that substitute would prove treacherous, impressing on me all over again the lesson I thought I had mastered—never to call deeply to anything as mine, never to become attached, not even to a prospective burial ground.
    IN 1990—IN MY NOTATION, the Year of Mandela’s Release—when he made Jamaica one of his earliest stopping points for his reunion with the living world, I made a startling discovery on that same island. If Nelson Mandela was discovering the space of freedom on a global scale, I was also discovering a micro-world that was founded in freedom. Thus did I embark on a pilgrimage that would begin as a sentimental, and evolve into a morbid, attachment.
    The timing of my presence in Kingston, Jamaica, with Mandela’s—even though we never did meet on that soil—imbued my discovery with an indefinable sense of augury, but then, let it be recalled that, like a large portion of the world, I had carried the calvary of Mandela and the struggle against apartheid South Africa in my head for longer than its continental replacement, the horror of an Abacharized Nigerian nation. Apart from participating in the mandatory “Free Mandela” marches, disinvestment campaigns, lecture sessions, anti-sanction-busting commissions, and so on, I had presented an early student play at London’s Royal Court Theatre,
The Invention,
on the insanities of the apartheid system. Decades after that production, I titled a collection of my poems
Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems,
and it seemed the most appropriate gesture, as I prepared for Stockholm in 1986, to dedicate my Nobel acceptance speech to him. (That was the speech in which, to my eternal chagrin, I listed Montesquieu among the contributors to European racist thinking—may the shade of Montesquieu find it in his ancestral heart to forgive that libel!)
    To find myself again in Kingston for a lecture engagement in 1990, for the first time in nearly fifteen years, just as the entire city was emptying itself out for Mandela, was already more than sufficient. It was a symbolic gift that I regarded as personal, not shared with the millions of ecstatic hordes that had labored for and now