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Authors: Chinua Achebe

Collected Poems

Chinua Achebe
Collected Poems

Chinua Achebe was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.

His early career in radio ended abruptly in 1966, when he left his post as director of external broadcasting in Nigeria during the national upheaval that led to the Biafran War. He was appointed senior research fellow at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and began lecturing widely abroad.

From 1972 to 1975, and again from 1987 to 1988, Mr. Achebe was professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and also for one year at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Cited in the London
Sunday Times
as one of the “1,000 Makers of the Twentieth Century” for defining “a modern African literature that was truly African” and thereby making “a major contribution to world literature,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays, and children's books. His volume of poetry
Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems
, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels,
Arrow of God
won the New Statesman–Jock Campbell Award, and
Anthills of the Savannah
was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize.

Mr. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Foreign Honorary Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as more than thirty honorary doctorates from universities in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, Nigeria, and South Africa. He is also the recipient of Nigeria's highest honor for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Order of Merit, and of Germany's Friedenpreis des Deutschen Buchhandels for 2002. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.

Mr. Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where they teach at Bard College. They have four children and three grandchildren.

Also by Chinua Achebe

Anthills of the Savannah

The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories

Things Fall Apart

No Longer at Ease

Chike and the River

A Man of the People

Arrow of God

Girls at War and Other Stories

Christmas in Biafra and Other Poems

Beware Soul Brother

Morning Yet on Creation Day

The Trouble with Nigeria

The Flute

The Drum

Hopes and Impediments

How the Leopard Got His Claws
(with John Iroaganachi)

Winds of Change: Modern Short Stories

from Black Africa
(with others)

African Short Stories
(editor, with C. L. Innes)

Another Africa
(with Robert Lyons)

Home and Exile

To the Memory of My Mother

In Lieu of a Preface: A Parable

The Author had begun to worry about his own conduct. Perhaps he had not been fair to his poems. Yes, the same poetry that had surged from the depths to bring pain-soaked solace in the breach and darkness of civil war. Now he had stepped out alone into the light.

Everyone knows, of course, that an author cannot possibly bring things to such a pass unaided. He had plenty of help from his then Publisher, who filled the role of primary culprit, leaving the Author with the guilt only of acquiescence and quietude. For, in truth, the Author had raised the matter of his poems now and again with the Publisher, aloof in his towers and battlements in distant London, unready for strange images and cadences; and his reply had always been a telegraphic non sequitur: We do very well with your novels, you know.

In time the poems, like all children reared in hardship, grew tougher and wiser than their peers. They figured out that as offspring of a heedless parent they were fated to find their own way in the world. Their unguided wandering before long brought them face-to-face with a magician, Negative Capability,
the holy man of the forest, shaggy-haired powered for eternal replenishment
, alias Man Pass Man; and he blessed their struggle.

They went out early one morning in search of validation and returned at nightfall singing and dancing and bearing aloft the trophy of Commonwealth Poetry. A few ripples, but no
waves. They contrived something breathtakingly audacious: they got Her Britannic Majesty to invoke six of their lines to end a royal admonition to her Commonwealth in crisis.
Remember also your children for they in their time …

More ripples, but hardly any waves. If the Publisher heard any of it he kept the news to himself, and kept also his blurb on the book of poems in which he absentmindedly praised the novels.

What happened next is not very clear, though there is no lack of speculation. The one certain fact, however, is that the poems went silent. Did they go underground, as one rather romantic commentator would have it, to cultivate a secret guild of readers? Nobody can really say. The Author does recall, however, that at about this time he had begun to observe increasing numbers of intense-looking men and women in his audiences who would go up to the dais at the end of a reading and ask—or even demand—to know where to find the book he read from.

An American photographer with a fine portfolio of African material came on the scene at this time with a request to the Author for collaboration. So impressed was the Author by the photographs that he readily agreed to contribute to a catalog of their exhibition, and became joint author of a magnificent coffee-table book with the beguiling title of
Another Africa.
In his enthusiasm he found himself traveling across the United States to Seattle and Portland, Oregon, to read and speak at the exhibition.

And then things took a sudden, unexpected turn. The Author received an urgent call from a lady who identified herself as Curator of
Another Africa
exhibition, now showing in a major museum in the Midwest, in a city that had better remain nameless. She wanted to know from the Author how she might get hold of his book of poems in a hurry.

  • -Why in a hurry?

  • -Because visitors to the exhibition are taking away your poems from the catalog.

  • -Taking away my poems, how?

  • -Ripping them out. And carrying them away.

  • -My gentle readers? Oh, dear!

  • -What's that?

  • -Never mind.

The Author has at last found a new Publisher who, unaware of these events, has set about publishing his collected poems. The Author, suitably chastened, is dreaming of a new day when peace will return to the affair of books, to wit: writing, publishing, and reading.

Prologue
1966

absentminded

our thoughtless days

sat at dire controls

and played indolently

slowly downward in remote

subterranean shaft

a diamond-tipped

drill point crept closer

to residual chaos to

rare artesian hatred

that once squirted warm

blood in God's face

confirming His first

disappointment in Eden

Nsukka, November 19, 1971

Benin Road

Speed is violence

Power is violence

Weight violence

The butterfly seeks safety in lightness

In weightless, undulating light

But at a crossroads where mottled light

From old trees falls on a brash new highway

Our separate errands collide

I come power-packed for two

And the gentle butterfly offers

Itself in bright yellow sacrifice

Upon my hard silicon shield.

Mango Seedling

Through glass windowpane

Up a modern office block

I saw, two floors below, on wide-jutting

concrete canopy a mango seedling newly sprouted

Purple, two-leafed, standing on its burst

Black yolk. It waved brightly to sun and wind

Between rains—daily regaling itself

On seed yams, prodigally.

For how long?

How long the happy waving

From precipice of rainswept sarcophagus?

How long the feast on remnant flour

At pot bottom?

Perhaps like the widow

Of infinite faith it stood in wait

For the holy man of the forest, shaggy-haired

Powered for eternal replenishment.

Or else it hoped for Old Tortoise's miraculous feast

On one ever recurring dot of cocoyam Set in a large bowl of green vegetables—

This day beyond fable, beyond faith?

Then I saw it

Poised in courageous impartiality

Between the primordial quarrel of Earth

And Sky striving bravely to sink roots

Into objectivity midair in stone.

I thought the rain, prime mover

To this enterprise, someday would rise in power

And deliver its ward in delirious waterfall

Toward earth below. But every rainy day

Little playful floods assembled on the slab,

Danced, parted round its feet,

United again, and passed.

It went from purple to sickly green

Before it died.

Today I see it still—

Dry, wire-thin in sun and dust of the dry months—

Headstone on tiny debris of passionate courage.

Aba, 1968

Pine Tree in Spring
(for Leon Damas)

Pine tree

flag bearer

of green memory

across the breach of a desolate hour

Loyal tree

that stood guard

alone in austere emeraldry

over Nature's recumbent standard

Pine tree

lost now in the shade

of traitors decked out flamboyantly

marching back unabashed to the colors they betrayed

Fine tree

erect and trustworthy

what school can teach me

your silent, stubborn fidelity?

The Explorer

Like a dawn unheralded at midnight

it opened abruptly before me—a rough

circular clearing, high cliffs of deep

forest guarding it in amber-tinted spell

A long journey's end it was though how

long and from where seemed unclear,

unimportant; one fact alone mattered

now—that body so well preserved

which on seeing I knew had brought me there

The circumstance of death

was vague but a floating hint

pointed to a disaster in the air

elusively

But where, if so, the litter

of violent wreckage? That rough-edged

gypsum trough bearing it like a dead

chrysalis reposing till now in full

encapsulation was broken by a cool

hand for this lying in state. All else

was in order except the leg missing

neatly at knee joint

even the white schoolboy dress

immaculate in the thin

yellow light; the face in particular

was perfect having caught nor fear

nor agony at the fatal moment.

Clear-sighted with a clarity

rarely encountered in dreams

my Explorer-Self stood a little

distant but somewhat fulfilled; behind

him a long misty quest: unanswered

questions put to sleep needing

no longer to be raised. Enough

in that trapped silence of a freak

dawn to come face-to-face suddenly

with a body I didn't even know

I lost.

Agostinho Neto

Neto, were you no more

Than the middle one favored by fortune

In children's riddle; Kwame

Striding ahead to accost

Demons; behind you a laggard third

As yet unnamed, of twisted fingers?

No! Your secure strides

Were hard earned. Your feet

Learned their fierce balance

In violent slopes of humiliation;

Your delicate hands, patiently

Groomed for finest incisions,

Were commandeered brusquely to kill,

Your melodious voice to battle cry.

Perhaps your family and friends

Knew a merry flash cracking the gloom

We see in pictures but I prefer

And will keep the darker legend.

For I have seen how

Half a millennium of alien rape

And murder can stamp a smile

On the vacant face of the fool,

The sinister grin of Africa's idiot-kings

Who oversee in obscene palaces of gold

The butchery of their own people.

Neto, I sing your passing, I,

Timid requisitioner of your vast

Armory's most congenial supply.

What shall I sing? A dirge answering

The gloom? No, I will sing tearful songs

Of joy; I will celebrate

The Man who rode a trinity

Of awesome fates to the cause

Of our trampled race!

Thou Healer, Soldier, and Poet!

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