Haiku Sun

Issue VII, October 2003

  Welcome to the October issue of Haiku Sun Ezine.

 This month, we are pleased to bring you the work of, the very talented, Richard Stevenson. We know you'll enjoy his unforgettable journey through a time of civil unrest in Africa in the early 1980's as told in the Asian style of haibun, as well as his series of haiku, Henderson Lake.

~Erin Harte, Editor of Haiku Sun

Headnote:

Maiduguri is the capital of Borno State in northeastern Nigeria.  When I lived there in the early eighties, president Shehu Shagari was losing his grip on an American style constitutional democracy of seventeen federated states.  A civil war was winding down in neighbouring Chad and inflation was raging.  Armed robbery and break-and-enter theft was at an all-time high ( My neighbour and I got robbed 17 times in two years! ) and war refugee thieves with machine guns were pouring across porous borders.  The following is an attempt to record some of the ironies and antinomies I witnessed seeing Africa through a blue-eyed squint.

*

I sleep each night with a jar of gasoline, matches, a knife, and piece of angle iron beside my bed, and a hired miguardi ( corruption of English "my guard" ) sits on my doorstep with a quiver of poison arrows.   A small boy squeezes through the burglar bars when the miguardi falls asleep, lets a man in my neighbour's front door.

Life in Maiduguri is certainly not boring!  Petrol shortages are a frequent occurrence and line ups, on foot on the hot tarmac with plastic jerry cans amid cabs and Suzuki motorcycle lines, an unfortunate necessity.  I have been waiting for the past eight hours for a few gallons of fuel. I notice the motions of the old world agama lizard swallowing a fly duplicate the jerking motions of the hose disgorging its precious fuel and recall that, in some states, among many of the animist peoples in the south where the oil comes from, the python -- another reptile -- is considered a sacred animal and is allowed free range.

The flora and fauna in Maiduguri -- low milkweed plants, thorn trees, grassland, baobab trees in the open sahel -- are a constant source of fascination and surprise.  Today, while cleaning up the house, I come across a large beetle upturned on its back.  When I turn it over with my broom handle, it proceeds to lumber across the floor, then emits a high, piercing sound that is all too human.

Everything is catch-as-catch-can in Maiduguri it seems.  Licenses are purchased for a bribe price, underaged drivers can barely peer over the dashboard, and auto repairs are accomplished by roadside mechanics sitting under crudely painted board signs hammered to neem trees.  Driving safety is a condition devoutly to be wished!

Microcosms echo macrocosms everywhere I look. Twilight lasts mere minutes as the sun sinks quickly four degrees off the equator.

I must adapt to all kinds of unusual circumstances.  The staff house I live in has been leased to the College where I teach by independent contractors.  Many of the manual labourers and carpenters are from small bush communities and are totally unfamiliar with western building standards and amenities.  Thus, they build things in ways that don't make a lot of sense.

A cab drives by with silhouette decals of the African continent on back windows -- upside down.  The cabbie brakes to the recorded titter of canary bird sounds.  A goat bleats from the trunk of another cab enroute to celebrate Muslim Salleh feast days. 

 

Even such a little thing as walking to work is fraught with all sorts of odd perils and communication gauntlets.  I have to pass a small gully to get to the road where I can flag down a cab.  This gully serves as the local outdoor biffy where the locals drop their drawers and hover behind the long skirts of their agbadas to "ease themselves."  What is the proper etiquette in passing a man engaged in the most natural of natural functions?  I greet them in Hausa rather than ignore them, but keep up a brisk pace and hold my breath nonetheless.  It occurs to me that I am the one with the problem.

This whole business of bathroom functions and hygiene is a constant concern.  Today, a fellow Canadian expat returns from his first foray to the local market with a look of horror on his face and a tale that has us all in an uproar -- until we learn the truth by checking out the market for ourselves.  We are crazy batures -- pronounced ba TOOR ays -- persons from Europe, whites on tour.  Very naive and very ignorant.

Nothing makes me smile quite so much the logo for Nigeria Airlines.  Considering how much extra luggage gets past the officials willing to accept "dash" -- bribes of local currency, surrendered at the last possible minute in exchange for the opportunity to come home laden with African masks, calabashes, sandcast bronze statues, etc. that exceed the thirty-five pound limit that will get us to Heathrow -- its a wonder we get off the ground at all.  ( No one told us the trans-Atlantic flight from Canada that allowed for 70 pounds would be halved on account of the short hop to England before connecting for the long haul.)

 

From The Henderson Lake Suite:

  

more patient than I,

kingfisher atop a snag

cocks his head, listens

 

*

 

water level down --

fish so much more visible

from shore

 

*

 

dandelion clock

holds up in a gentle breeze --

I walk more slowly

 

*

 

all flags droop today --

even butterflies flutter

close to the ground

 

*

 

Did Issa notice?

Even the ants hotfoot it

during these dog days

 

*

 

blood red moon --

even now forest fire smoke

leaves the sky bruised

 

 

Richard Stevenson is a Canadian poet, currently living in Lethbridge, AB, where he teaches at the local community college.  He has 15 books to his credit, though only recently has turned his pen to the short imagist forms.  Two collections of haiku have been accepted, one of African material, Hot Flashes, which came out from Ekstasis Editions in Victoria, BC in 2001; the other, forthcoming from Spotted Cow Press in Edmonton, AB, is southern AB, west coast of BC stuff.  A third, A Charm of Finches, is under consideration with Ekstasis as well.