And Then I Fed my Father’s Dog.

He had a booming laugh,

He was a very handsome man and he knew it.

He knew how to read the minds of a toddler and the kinds of play that they loved,

And he would join in with them and go on forever.

Such was my father’s love.

Symbiotic in your preschool years but freeing after your first day of school.

He loved to hold court, surrounded by his children while the gifted one of us told of folklore.

He did love his beer, as he sat bare-chested in the evening cooling air, but I hated to rub his back.

I didn’t understand him, I was a child and he towered and as such scared me.

He loved his dog Tiger to distraction, but Tiger had love for him and only him. 

I hated that he made me give to Tiger, the bone from my drumstick that I was still working on,

And in his absence, when I called to Tiger to come with me on a walk, it would give me an arrogant baleful look and return to lazying in the sun, stupid dog!!

The background noise of my childhood: my father insisting “let the boy do what he wants to do.”

The other was not happy, "make him do what I want,”

“It’s his life, let the boy do what he would do,” my father pronounced and returned to his newspaper and Tiger, watching the scene, would cozy up to his legs.

Such was my father’s love.  It didn’t take the stance of conquering the world and laying it at my feet.  He left the conquering of the world to me and my soul’s dictates.

Kehinde's Israel

I will begin this blog with a disclaimer:  This is NOT a political commentary on the State of Israel by any means.

Sea of Galilee

Israel is a very beautiful country and this is one thing that I never heard said about Israel until after my trip when I stumbled on a page “Israel is Beautiful” on Facebook.  But like someone responded, “Is it any more beautiful than the rest of the middle east or the whole of the Mediterranean coast for that matter?” and another response was ‘my mother in law visited there a few years ago and she didn’t think it was all that.” Well, for many years now, I have learnt not to listen to just the words being spoken but to understand what is doing the speaking. And in these situations what was speaking didn’t take anything away from me about the beauty of Israel.

My son said to his sister, “Mom is Jewish now, she came back from Israel and now decorates the house with mezuzah and menorah,” he left the other half out and that is “Mom is probably Arabic too because there are also hamsa by the doors to keep away the evil eye, figurines of a camel and Aladdin lamp on the mantel and a Bedouin Arab quilt hanging on the wall, not to speak of lots of Arabic jewelry and scarves bought from the souks in Jerusalem.”

A few weeks after I returned from my one week trip to Israel, I had this dream:

I am driving by in a landscape that is unmistakably Michigan and I saw a big road sign pointing to Migdal, so I followed the road and I arrived at Migdal, and it isn’t just a namesake of the Migdal—the birth place of Mary Magdalene that is in the Galilee area in Israel, but it is the very Migdal that is in Israel that is now in Michigan in the USA, and in the manners of dreams, it was conveyed to me that the USA has stolen this real Migdal from Israel. I was furiously indignant, and had a lot of un-publishable words to say about it in my dream. On waking, the meanings of the dream are totally personal to me, and my psychology.  And Migdal was returned to her rightful place in Israel.

I Dreamt of Many Children

What treasures are you bringing to me? I asked of them.

For that is the meaning of children in a dream.

They are never still, busy, running, climbing,

jumping, skipping, pushing, touching, breathing,

hugging, crying, laughing, and through it all,

wide-eyed with expectations.

Expectations and Anticipations.

For they believe, 

that I have it in me.

They want me to bring them to life.

Bring them to life?

What a huge responsibility!

“But you can do it.” their anticipating gaze pulled at me.

“But you are so many.” I cringed away from my destiny.

“Yes, we are.” They chorused in giggles.

“And there are many more of us. There are zillions of us where we came from, and if you bring us to life, many more will come, and they will keep coming and coming and coming and coming . . .”

I am the wide-eyed one now,

not in expectation but in terror.

I had wondered before in my waking mind

‘what would it be like to have 365 children,

One for each day of the year?’

Terror! Abdication!

But they could read my thoughts.

“No silly,” they giggled again, as they jumped, skipped, hugged and kissed,

And yet some were in the tree that I didn’t see before.

“You will stay and embrace us, and we, we will take care of you.

All you have to do is hug us and listen to us.”

“That is all?” Skepticism!

“Yes, silly,” they chorused again, and they were touching me, breathing on me, shoving me, pulling me, jumping on my knees….

Crossroads.

I grew up with this proverb, “Iko rita meta, idamu alejo,” i.e. A crossroad is the predicament of a visitor/stranger. And each time I heard it, I had this image of a stranger arriving in the metropolis that was Ibadan of my childhood from my grandmother’s small village in Ekiti, and he would be in the traditional four piece suit of Fila, Agbada, Buba and Sokoto all of which were made of Aso Oke and he would have a horse tail in his hand. He would be standing at an intersection with three, four or more roads meeting and he would be reeling around and around and around in confusion while waving the horse tail, perhaps to ward off the ever present flies, or, to maybe clear the fog that he thinks its in his mind for he knew he was in a quandary.

Why this image? I grew up in a household ruled by my maternal grandmother who missed her small village very much and so most of her discourses were about this nostalgia. And her relatives did come down often to visit bringing with them lots of yams, some vegetables, chickens and a goat once in a while along with lots of stories about the happenings in the village and these, my grandmother would savor with relish. The relatives in turn would be overwhelmed with the city teeming with zillions of people and so many roads and vehicles, and my grandmother in turn would reassure them.

There were other references to crossroads as well, I remember walking to my elementary school with my twin brother early in the mornings, and on arriving at certain crossroads in our neighborhood we would find pieces of broken clay pots, and in some of the larger pieces would be a peculiar combination of stuff—palm oil, a coin, dead rat, chicken skull, some large feather belonging to some bigger bird like a hawk, and once we saw the head of a dog, at another time, the eye of a big animal, and usually some precious beads like corals and other weird and bizarre combinations of things. Each time we see this, I would freak out as I felt my head expand and contract, and as we had been warned several times by my superstitious grandmother and other housemaids, we would give the offering, for that was what they were a wide berth as we hurried along on our way.

Oriki is ‘The Call of the Head.’

It is poetry loved by the Yoruba of Western Nigeria and perhaps other parts of Africa and had been taken by the black race into the Diaspora because a vestige of it was featured in the movie “Ali,” in which the character of Drew Bundini Brown played by Jamie Foxx, repeatedly sang poetry to Mohammed Ali before, during and after his fights, calling on Ali’s ‘head.’ There is a poignant scene in which Ali had kicked Brown off his entourage after he admitted to selling Ali’s championship belt on the street for $500 to feed his heroin addiction, Brown shows up to beg for his job back and he was clean of drugs; Ali relents when he starts the call of the head poetry—“Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee,” and the two of them finished the poem in unison.

At the lips of talented orators, it is something to behold. An example was the Premier of Western Nigeria in the early 1960s Chief S.L. Akintola all of whose political speeches be it state of the union address, canvassing for votes, cursing out his enemies, or lauding his supporters were poetic orations powerful enough to hypnotize a person.

Oriki includes family history, praise, warnings, admonishments and admirations. It is not flattery, but based on real accomplishments and failures of the family. It goes back many generations, thus each family has the Oriki unique to them. It is sang for a person usually by his parents and loved ones in times when he/she is depressed, challenged, going through trials or tribulations, or after the person has accomplished something remarkable like moving from one threshold to another, or as an appeal to the person. If the individual is in despair, it reminds the person whom he is, where he came from, and where he is hoping to go. It is one of the rituals to accompany the person through the challenging tasks of life and for him/her to know that others have faced the challenges before and have succeeded.