Adebowale Oriku

Homosexuality And African Discontents. Part 2.

My last article on NVS caused some storm in a teacup. At least I am not so vain as to think anything I’d written had called down a cosmic storm, to say nothing of a tempest. It’s no more than a teacup squall, really. But inside the teacup some homunculi, as small as myself, had directed missiles as heavy as hailstones at me. It was like a season of the long knives and daggers, daggers and knives aimed at me. I discovered that hell hath no fury like apparently heterosexual men reading a rather free-spoken piece about homosexuality (I suspect this might become an unlook-at-able word on NVS) and their right to be human.  

The broadside came fast and furious. Not that I wasn’t expecting it, either. The first person had even tried to psychoanalyse me. Ah this writer - that is me - is coming out right here on NVS. The unknown shrink had even waxed more profound: Possibly the writer - me again - is dealing with a sexual conflict in his innermost self. Depth psychology is my long suit, and while I understand the commenter’s anger, I think trying to second-guess someone you do even know, whose body of writing you are no more familiar with than a score or so articles on NVS, is rather brave. For all my drawbacks as a writer, I always try not to be too presumptuous of people's motives.

The maledictory disapprobation had gone on and on – and of course no one was going to offer any quarter, except for a muffled voice begging the gripers to leave judgment to God.  And what was unleashed on me? Not just mere anger, but good old wrath, ire, sulphur, spleen. It was if Lucifer himself had sneaked into righteousness heaven, borrowed some canines, taken them into netherworld, changed them into hounds of hell, and let them loose on the person who’d written the devilish article.

In a funny sort of way, I like the way NVS does not filter the messages of commenters, it seems to bring out the worst and the best in people. It is an opportunity to lash out anonymously at someone you do not know from Adam or from Eve, a chance to be vicious at someone else's expense and not answer for it. Although I rarely write comments to articles, still less outright abusive comments, I don’t think it’s all that bad for the psyche to be on the receiving end every once in a while. Since such a thing would certainly not kill you it’d make you tougher – apologies to both Kanye West and Nietzsche.

Nothing should stop anyone from writing anything they want to write – unless direct insults are passed. And, anyway, I think NVS would spike any article or comment that truly offends. Ad hominen criticisms may carry some minor yaps at times, but for me they never hold the potency of a bite, let alone a bark. Now the person who had tried to analyze me might be surprised that I wrote the article purely as a neolibertarian, who do not even have a single gay acquaintance, and not because I don’t see them as being worthy of friendship but because they do not often come within my sphere.

The last person who sent out his brickbats said he wished to restrain himself, that he would endeavour to keep himself on a leash, since I had been given some ‘beatings’ (sic) by earlier commenters, so he would not waste his wrath on me. But oh, but how he let fly, how he tried to clobber me with his fat koboko. Playing the Grand Inquisitor, he single-handedly turned me into a moral heresiarch only fit for the stake. He was like the top-dog among a chorus of those who thought they were singing over the tragic playlet of a man – me – whose hubris had brought down. He was like the proverbial Yoruba or Igbo senior masquerader who shows up and leaves the sacred grove last (Egun nla loun kehin igbale). Among other things he suggested that if it was in ‘bad’ old days, I would have been marched to ‘Igbo Igbale’ - what Prof. Chinua Achebe might call the ‘evil forest’ - and be left to tickle the palate of the gods.

I imagine the commenter, otherwise called Agidimolaja, knows something about Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind and who was punished by Zeus by being chained to a rock, his vitals feasted upon by a bird of prey, freed by Hercules after unnumbered years, something that had inspired PB Shelley’s poem Prometheus Unbound, a title he borrowed from a play by Aeschylus.

For in the forest of the gods to which Agidimolaja said I should be transported, I would certainly have survived. The gods would have seen that, well, this was certainly not their sort of meat, this one was tough and lined with gristle and tendon. In the forest I would have become one of the more mischievous among the gods - Agidimolaja knows the impish deity in Yoruba pantheon, I believe - and return to Agidimolaja’s village to torture him every night. Or if I was too busy personally to go and punish Agidimolaja, I would send one of the animals serving me, a mouse, say. The mouse would visit Agidimolaja during witching hours and nibble at the sole of his callous peasant feet, blowing cool air on the bruises so he could eat more and more.

Anyway, I got a chortling kick from reading the supposedly cudgelling comments, I saw how we can easily slip into savaging someone we believe – often mistakenly – has overreached himself. I remember a friend admonishing me to be careful about what I wrote as I might get myself in twisted short-trousers very soon. But why self-censor when you know you only write according to your candid lights? Why must you care whose solar plexus is punctured by the horns of your opinions? Wouldn’t it be condescending to make a point of wearing kid’s gloves before writing articles that would be read by the Nigerian public?

Agidimolaja would not stop with thinking of sending me off to the ancient Yoruba Siberia, he also tried to play with my surname. First, as an elderly Yorubaman, he ought to have realised that ‘Oriku’ is an Elder’s Name (that is Oruko Agba), and should not have made any attempt to make fun of it. It is a name that should be mentioned and called with solemnity and awe. It is a name that would bring tinnitus not to my ears, the bearer of the name, but to the ears of the person who called it in vain.

On a serious note, my surname Oriku is by no means a common Yoruba name. Just as Agidimolaja had taunted, you could easily translate it as ‘the head is dead.’ Which is all very well, in as much as I know that I have a very much wide-awake head. And as we all know, the old Yoruba proverb of Oruko nii roni – your name precedes you – is not always true, just like any number of Yoruba proverbs, which is why Yoruba funnymen in films can do whatever they like with the proverbs, reinterpret them for comic moments.

I once lived in an African country where I had to go to the trouble of deconstructing not just my surname Oriku, but Adebowale too – and Debo, which means woman in the one of the country’s languages! Using Jean Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as a fulcrum, I had done some existential rehashing of my names, twisting them here and there, shuffling and rearranging. For example, Adebowale had become Elawobeda.

Before the upending, though, I explained how I came to be called Adebowale: ‘the crown comes home’ – simply because an uncle was about to be crowned the ‘king’ of my hometown then. Anyway, to show how meaningless names could sometimes be, the uncle never became king, the earlier decision to enthrone him was overturned by the courts, so the crown never really came to our ‘home.’ I had also made an anagram of Ade into Eda and had explained the meaning of both.

It was when I tried to make Oriku into Ukiro that I realised how Japanese both handles sounded. Oriku, besides being a Japanese name (again for a woman) is a form of acrostic poem, as concise and punchy as a haiku, a more popular thumbnail Japanese poem. Playing on words myself, I once tried Oriku’s Triple Haiku. Years later, I had read Mistress Oriku by Matsutaro Kawaguchi, a fine book that I bought and read because of the title. 

And even years later, through the internet, I had discovered that some Kenyans also bear Oriku. I don’t know what it means in Kenya, but I guess it is something meaningful. Just as in Yoruba. Agidimolaja was not the first person that would attempt to barbarise my surname. During my secondary school years, friends used to josh me with deliberate mispronunciations of my surname, often enunciating it in Yoruba as ‘head is dead.’ Well, even in those days it didn’t really matter to me as I knew they knew how to say it properly.

Mr Agidimolaja may have thought he had delivered a witty coup de grace – a death blow – by coming up with the dead-head shtick. But sir, no - so far as I am concerned, literalising Oriku is a tired, dead wind-up. Just as I tried to explain in the reply to the gentleman’s comment, Oriku is a Yoruba vernacular for a ‘head that refuses to die’ (ori ti ko ku), you only need put a mental tilde on top of the ‘i’ in Oriku after removing the dot, then drawl it accordingly. Agidimolaja’s interpretation of the name was dead wrong, complete opposite of what it means.

But then again, I like black humour a lot, so Agidimolaja’s decision to consider my head as dead is honestly funny, I mean funny-haha. It’s like waking up to find your head being served on the platter to a king (King Agidimolaja, say) – like John the Baptist’s head was served to Herod as a treat from his stepdaughter, Salome. And what do you become if you find your head on a platter? A Talking Head - which is what we all are.  

Robot  # 1 | 05.04.2009 20:34

Adebowale Oriku Ref:Homosexuality And African D... Homosexuality And African D... My last article on NVS caused some storm in a teacup. At least I am not so vain as to think anything I’d written had called down a cosmic storm, to say nothing of a tempest. It’s no more than a teacup squall, really. But inside the teacup some homunculi, as small as myself, had directed missiles as heavy as hailstones at me. It was like a season of the long knives and daggers, daggers and knives aimed at me. I discovered that hell hath no fury like apparently heterosexual men reading a ra...Read the full article.