PS - The goodly advice as a social service to the Brethren, cannot be sufficiently emphasised. You wouldn't believe how many Brethren are in prison, wrongly or rightly accused and found guilty of rape.
In Sweden when she says "NO" it usually means "NO" and why insist when there are thousands of women out there, who are willing and able ? As ridiculous as the fish in the water complaining of thirst !
Sometimes the problem is cultural - the resistance of "NO" is not necessarily coyness or preliminary " hypocrisy" inviting you to use "just a little" force.
NO, means NO.
There are also innocent people in prison because later on when she woke up sober the morning after - or with a slight hangover, and found the soul brother - the one she had danced with all last night and took a taxi home - and now he's still snoring gently with a smile on his face, she could change her mind , maybe give him a slap to wake him up and ask him, "What are you smiling about ? " or "What are you doing in my bed ?"
Or leave him still snoring and steal away to the Police Station to make a report. Maybe she returns with the Police. Him still snoring soundly.
At the trial, she could be wearing a red mini skirt. With lustful eyes the male judges eye her prancing around, or sobbing uncontrollably in the witness box Booty therapy . Just one look at her curvaceous behind and the male judges could have already arrived at their verdict even before the Brother takes the witness stand : " By Gad! The Negro must have done it" ( in their heart of hearts, maybe thinking, " And in his shoes, I would have done it too I"
If the accused enters the courtroom escorted by the Police and looking dejected, they think, he is now feeling remorseful. If he looks normal or unperturbed or defiant, the idea is that he did it and doesn't even show any remorse.
Later, it's in the papers - it increases the xenophobia and there's much talk that "These people come here, take our women and those who say "NO", they rape them!"
On Tuesday, 31 October 2017 23:43:20 UTC+1, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:
31st October, 2017
Stockholm.
Chidi,
I take you seriously, when you are serious, that is. Sometimes, when you are being profoundly cynical/sarcastic/ negative/wise/ pessimistic/cautiously optimistic / wary, you remind me of Benjamin the donkey in Animal Farm . Please note: It's not meant to be an insult.
Re - your words :
"Sometimes,
We are lured
Into the lair
Of lucifer. "
Just as with anybody else, sometimes when you are cryptic or in the double-speak mode ( as Bob Dylan very often is) you are open to various interpretations. This time you are more straightforward. Indeed Sir, the third thing I thought of when I read you words above, was the horrible lyrics in this song by Black Widow – Come To The Sabbath which has the refrain
" Come! Come ! Come to the Sabbat
Come to the Sabbat, Satan's there !"
The fourth thing I thought was of Hon. Minister Louis Farrakhan going on about
And fifthly, the young Somali lad I encountered in the underground the other day , his cellphone had run out of juice and he kindly asked me if he could please use mine. I obliged him. After he had made his call we chatted for awhile, we got off at the same station shook hands and then I asked him his name. He replied, " My name is Lucifer!" - involuntarily I exclaimed, " what!" and he explained that Lucifer was originally an angel of light etc etc. Of course, when he asked me politely if he could please use my phone, if I had asked him what's your name, and he had told me "Lucifer", I would not have allowed him to use my phone. In fact that would have been the end of the conversation. Now, for all I know, that was the real Lucifer that I shook hands with or a young Somali homey who has adopted the name" Lucifer" to be the baddest cat in his rapper group...
Your poems, poetic thoughts and special reports are a social service and what I say here below is also meant to be a social service primarily addressed to the Brethren .
Absolutely correct, Sir Chidi Anthony Opara, when you say that
"Sometimes,
We are lured
Into the lair
Of lucifer. "
On the other hand, the lucky ones who escape must thank their lucky stars that
"Sometimes,
we are not lured
into the lair
Of Lucifer"
Beware of some perfumes, because sometimes, Lucifer comes in the shape a beautiful woman, la lionelle and there's no point in dousing yourself with petrol and then dancing with fire and believing that you won't be set ablaze and eventually go up in smoke.
In " Skin to skin" HarryBelafonte wails, " Her fire is burning me! Her fire is burning me! "
"cold desperation, she's a devil in bed, scratching till my bones are bare"
just ask the late Al Jarreau song no.4 …
Calmly enough she begins, Hi Chidi, my name is Lucy or Hi, how are you? You may call me Lucy - and that's when - from then on , you've got to be careful, Chidi.
More than four years later, poor Julian Assange is still holed up in the Ecuador Embassy in London. He has not been tried or convicted, but just ask him why up till today he can't go back home as a free man or why he's afraid to go to Stockholm to clarify what happened that evening.
If she opens the door only wearing her pyjamas/ kimono/underwear or only in her birthday suit no underwear at all, just like the original Eve in the garden of Eden , then brave one, either you depart from her presence immediately - just as Joseph departed / tried to depart posthaste away from Zuleikha - the she-devil/Pharaoh's wife - or all is lost.
When Lucy puts on that Diana Ross song " It's my house, and I live here " , a very popular song in early 80s Nigeria, you've got to be very careful and you've got to be even more very careful over here in Sweden , especially if the she-devil is single because just the next verse goes, it's not a joke :
"There's a welcome mat at the door
And if you come on in
You're gonna get much more
There's my chair
I put it there
Everything you see
Is with love and care"
Of course the first thing that some hungry, sex-starved guys look for in Lucy's lair is for the shock absorbers, pillows etc in the King size bed…
We've got to be extra-careful because these days it looks like the women are on the warpath and anyone - just about anyone can jump up and say that Chidi or some big bad Negro brute called "Thomas " jumped on her and her friend last week, last month, last year, ten years ago, sometime in the 1970s of the last century, in the summer of 1973 . Got to be careful Chidi.
In circa 2005 apart from a Zimbabwean dude living down the road with his Swedish chick - he told me a couple of times that he was a lawyer (not clear whether a jurist, barrister or solicitor or both ) and apart from him - I was living in a more or less all white neighbourhood and got to confirm that it was an all white neighbourhood on election day, when I didn't see a single person that looked like me, at the school where we went to cast our ballot. A couple of months later , late at night a young Swedish lady on her way home is dragged from the road and raped in the roadside bushes - she reports that it was dark but her rapist looked dark , maybe a negro - she couldn't see him so well, but he looked darkish in colour and probably had dark hair too. Looked dark? Had dark hair? Well there's one living over there, somebody points in the direction of my abode. Heaven forbid ! Well, it was dark, and she couldn't see her assailant very well.
Suppose they had come knocking on my door and she had said " Yes, that's him!" and you know all Negroes look alike in the dark, and all they can see then is the white of our eyes.
To other unpleasant things.
It is reported that when he was tempted in the wilderness by Satan, Jesus said, "Get thee behind me Satan !" According to Obi, if old Jesus of the Galilee were to be walking on this planet today and the subtle serpent in the shape of Eve approached him once again say in San Francisco, doing his thing in contemporary spoken word Spanish or English poetry Jesus should not say " Get thee behind me Satan" he should instead reflect his distaste by using the language that the serpent would better understand these days and say something like , "Stop the shit, you fkkking slut " or "you get the fff outta my hair ya old muthfafkker!" because , perhaps, addressing Satan or " the Great Satan" as " thee" would be showing him too much respect. As Obi has made clear should the same old Jesus appear now, more than 2,000 years later, by now, by all accounts his language would according to Obi , be " significantly dated and archaic: contemporary poetry dispenses with words like "upon" as much as possible, for instance. It is like saying "thou" and "thine." "
- although, in this free word world, iconoclastic as he (Obi) sometimes is - even to his elders, I don't think that Obi's literary criticism would extend to Jesus' son of God poetry, no matter in which ancient or modern language Jesus would choose to address the nations so that everybody who hears, understands and I do suppose that apart from the immutable lashon hakodesh Jesus would be rapping with the rappers in Los Angeles and in New York, in the East Coast where half of his people now reside ; no doubt the Negro-Igbo Jews in Owerri would much prefer that he spoke to them in their mother tongue Igbo or in the Aramaic which he spoke the löast time he was on earth or perhaps that he addressed them preferably in in contemporary Nigerian English.
Claude Kayat, one of my more literary friends who himself has researched and written a book about Jesus, entitled " The Thirteenth Disciple" recommends this book for those who would have a better understanding of the translations of the Gospel from the language " Aramaic , which Jesus spoke during his earthly existence :
" Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus"
Concerning the devil business, a pious Muslim takes refuge in his Creator from " Stan the accursed" with these words after which the ritual prayers in Islam are said : a'uzu billahi minashaitanir rajim .
I'm sure that's what the Muslim senators say before entering through the portals of the Nigerian Senate...
Umar Bin Hassan : Be bop or be dead
We Africans are people's people, are sociable, love people, Whitey too ( I've known him/ her/them all my life) and Whitey too loves people, of course loves himself and his own kind more than he loves anybody else but can often feel good, helping others for example in Puerto Rico ; it's often cringe or starve..
Chidi, there's an enormous amount of poetry also being written in Swedish/ Swenglish Broken Swedish/ Rinkeby -Swedish etc or translated from Swedish/ Swenglish into English . There's no basis for saying that Nigerian English is/ is not moving at parallel rate of development as is "The Queen's English"
.
BTW, as I said somewhere before and this is also about the absolute relevance of whatever anyone says in this forum : "True too, the armchair critics are also valuable and as we all know we can only grow if we are also permitted to give and take criticism"
Last night I was feeling distraught (like Jane Austen) pisssed would be a much better word to describe the feeling and completely taken by surprise at what Obi wrote, probably, literally, in high -literary & mean- spirited mode, perhaps after a glass too many of the blood-red wine or some of the best from Scotland and feeling absolutely a little "so so ish" as Keats put it in a letter to his sister. I thought and still think that it was a good example of bad taste. Period. Somebody writes an eulogy, poem, funeral dire or composes a requiem for Fela and it's the height of not only bad taste, but bad manners to want to disembowel or piss on any such work of love. Like pissing on your father's grave.You could probably think of a worse simile? Let the Bomboclat , go down to Trench town which is in Kingston, Jamaica go down there in the Ghetto to disembowel Mutabaruka and Luciano's adaptation of Psalm 24 in which they celebrate Jah Rastafari or just go there with some highfalutin literary shit about the state of Nigerian English letters vis a vis what he thinks should be the modern language and metaphor of modern Jah poetry in the diaspora that's still speaking in tongues - tell them that Marcus Garvey is not modern poetry , tell them how / what is and what is not modern poetry according to Dr. Obi , tell Luciano to modernise the language when he sings his Psalm 23 tell them that it's too old fashioned and they should not use any reverential "thees" and" thous" or that the poem is not about Emperor Selassie but about the ALMIGHTY HIMSELF and see if he will leave the place alive or if they will have to carry him out in a coffin and from there fly him to Biafra for the funeral rites...
If I want to waste my time I could go to work on and do a pretty good job, disembowelling Obi's nice poetry, approach it with a torchlight , machete, koboko, pincer, microscope and I'm no nice Alexander Pope either.
Thinking of Mankind Olawale Oyewumi and the profundities that would ease from his keyboard if he were in my shoes just now.
That Funerals are the last passage of rites that terminate the seven ages of man
Over the past 40 years ; starting in 1978 with the funeral of Hugh Satterfield ( Professor Lobo - who used to present Jazz programs in Radio Free Europe) I have attended funerals mostly here in Stockholm in which it was clearly the wishes of the deceased that they wanted to elevate and enhance their last farewell with music by Duke Ellington, Miles, Trane, Bird, etc in spirit we were all there for the funeral of Bob Marley, Fela...
There's "In Memoriam A.H.H." by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a requiem for his dear friend Arthur Hallam…
Let us pray Chidi - to the Almighty - remember our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, neatest and dearest on earth and those who have departed pray for our friends, call them by name - Chidi, Ogbeni Kadiri, Obi, even pray that the evil ones will become good. You can't remember everyone each time you pray , and just praying for Israel or for the Palestinians is less abstract but for the social and sociable Africans to petitio the Almighty , calling everyone by name, your prayers could last hours and even then you discover that you didn't mentions some dear people. Your contact lists, telephone directors, obituary lists won't cover everybody either, but the Omniscient Almighty knows that when you say please Dear Almighty,, bless everybody, that you mean EVERYBODY of His creation…
It's not easy. yesterday I posted in this Saro Forum that if only there was only one tribe in the whole country, and everybody from the North, South, East, West and everywhere else in the country, the Allens, Banguras, Browns Coles, Contehs, Davies, Easmons, Kamaras, Sesays, belonged to the same tribe then it would be more of one love, one people, one country, one destiny. I suppose that the same would be true of Nigeria; In Sierra Leone, of course I know some people who would not like to belong to the same tribe as Abdul and unfortunately, that's usually the crux of the matter.
Lyrics based on a poem by Langston Hughes :
Anyway, as in Gaia,
Pray for the forest pray for the tree,
Pray for the fish in the deep blue sea.
Pray for yourself and for God's sake,
Say one for me, poor wretched unbeliever.
Cornelius
On Tuesday, 31 October 2017 08:46:24 UTC+1, Chidi Anthony Opara wrote:Sometimes,
We are lured
Into the lair
Of lucifer.
CAO.
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