Poetry - This is Bonamoussadi (An Excerpt)

By Oscar Chenyi Labang

This is Bonamoussadi
Flanked by Holy St Ann
And the Mighty Ngoa Ekelle
Whence we tap the raw stuff.
Arnold defines a real Professor
From Green Valley’s interior:
‘A Real Professor is one;
He talks in others sleep.
As we roll from end to end
Memories of a day with a Professor
Caress the mind.

You smile
Even in the horror or grotesque
Of that lonesome night in the heat.
Not the dim witted doodles
That move the corridors
With majesty and dignity
Trailing their shadows
Like swollen anacondas
Looking:
A political gap
To stock their ill-bred faces
And celebrate the anarchy
Or
Some intending lass
To waste their waist
In the ecstatic violation of vocations’

On the margin of the bouillon
Marks celebrate the stupidity of
Sepianta Collectiva Cognitio

‘A Real Dr is one who has the courage
Not to forget the good old days in Bonas
(or who benefits the companionship of another)
He tunnels through filthy corridors
And sneak into female rooms in the cité
And almost instantly a crick
A groan... Passion… groans grow...
The anxious but uncourageous
Neighbour boy ablaze
His groins heating
Like a locomotive steam engine -
He goes charging across
The muddy paths
Like American missiles in Iraq.

A real Doctor is at work
Sweating and swearing
‘I never had this dose before
I’ll come again and again’
In this hot confession
Mami changes his mindset
And Six is read Sixteen.
        Mami sets a test:
You go to Church?
Yes ehhh ehhh
You pray our father?
Yes ehhh ehhh
You’ll pray it now?
Yes ehhh ehhh
Pray then -.
Thinking this a lecture hall,
He burst out arrogant:
‘Our Father
Who art in heaven
Hallow hallow hal--low low low
   aahh aahh life is good’.

On the margin of the bouillon
Marks celebrate the stupidity of
Sepianta Collectiva Cognitio

Driven from his cubicle
The neighbour boy has found none
Now he blames his father’s father
At idle park, cursing the regime
To emit the anger of lust.

Professors back from secret missions
Resume their proper erudition,
Though some regret it;
They liked their dictaphones a lot
They met some big wheels, and do not
Let you forget

My noble friend, the poet father, hides behind, 
The fall of a fellow artist and makes a name.
A young poet in the corridor tells the story
Of the trial of John at Jerold’s headquarter
How on the recommendation of a tribe woman
Jerold chopped up his brainchild. In his palms
It wriggled, writhe, changed into multitude of shapes
And finally turned to another dismissible vision:
Across...
The prophet triumph.....

This is Bonamousadi
The Federal Republic in La Republique
Ten churches in a hundred metres
No! Prayer houses
No! Centres of Hope
Yes! Centres of hope for hopeless youth
They have a function
Each is spiced by a Practitioner’s smithy
Even the preacher needs their services.
Behind the church
An old man on a baby’s labs
              For God so lust the world...
              Whosoever...
              Shall not pédé…

The cold pong of blistered potatoes
Commingle with the pungent whiff
Jumping out of toilet valves
Caresses nostrils in anger.
Masturbating frogs grunt in filthy gutters
Lesbian Lizards limp across ceiling edges
Leasing libidinal energy in waste
Aging men celebrate the ambitions
Of a prosperous old age under the blanket
Treason to marital vows!...
Foetal remains stink
Cold halves are snatched
From the teeth of dogs
Cats and rats reconcile
In dark corners over a share…
Bed time heroes celebrate
In the indifference of the half moon
This is Bonamoussadi.

Torrent! Torrent!
Water from washed corpses
Dance down from the slopes of CUSS
And splash in arrogance against
The banks of River Bonas
Torrent! Torent!
Spatter! Splatter! Splash!
The river overflows
Grubby grey and grimy substances
Squeeze their way onward
Our bedroom-parlour-kitchen
Self-Contained containers;
Bags of garri swell like the corpse of an evil man
Mattress thickens - shit particles - a bundle of hey
Pots and Basins dance like fury boats
In a troubled seas.
Shoes breathe from under like sea pearls.
We come home,
Listen to the propaganda of the New Dealers,
Thank His Fraudulency
For the new look of the rooms.
We continue to worship the power monarch
As time runs on the wheels of Time.

We are saved by WWF
W - Wine
W - Women
F - Food
Three words
The fire place
On which the pot
Of wooden unity boils
Away the pot and content.

The land is bleached and battered to sand
And only errors and regrets we utter
Flowers can’t grow on gardens of stone…

The humid shadows of the dusky night were already beginning to spread over the parched earth, and the sweet birds were gone to sleep in their nest…

The poet on the back of a swallow has soar up in the virgin blue sky, seen and known his people and must retire to the suburbs of himself to reconcile with Binyui so she may be watered for another task…

Comments

[Wirndzerem G. Barfee]

If Bonass' squalor throws up this rich inspiration, then poetry like god is everywhere and in everything!Labang's incisive scalpel rips pointblankly into the abscess and i would not doubt the costly price of his critique...but poetry is suffering and suffering, poetry. At least, most poetry.Healing places all diseased, our citadels have lamentably decayed into brothels...vraiment, c'est du bordel!