Kalakuta Republic Read online

  Not in defeat. Or cowardice,

  but as a statement

  of our

  Discontent

  with this state of barbarism we

  live

  Under

  the shade of a tree

  executions are mercifully shielded

  from the harsh sun.

  Killing Time

  1900

  hours.

  Killing time. 12. Anointed.

  Blindfolded. Herded by seraphs

  wings tinged rusty by innocent blood.

  Stapled

  to a pock-marked wall by fear

  steel bolts, ratchet bullets.

  Shots crack

  like so many branches.

  Of 12, 8 fall.

  Shirt, pencil and all.

  I know I am alive

  because

  terror drips down my legs.

  Jeremiah

  Jeremiah

  was 6 feet, 9 inches the last

  time we measured.

  Face,

  knotted against

  sun-hard pain,

  unravels.

  Smiles, spread hemp

  tendrils.

  Often

  fasting, he passes his food to

  weaker, needier men.

  He

  stood between guards and a prone man,

  helping him up

  to

  die on his feet, knees only slightly

  buckled, eyes kissing the sun.

  The Box

  Wooden frame with skirt of sheet metal

  6 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot.

  Pin-pricks of air burn holes on the negative

  of my body; choking on my own smell mingled

  with scent of seared hair and skin,

  I taste my pungent mortality.

  One hour later:

  Religion unfurls in desperate splendour.

  Silently through old man’s mumbling lips

  prayers tumble forth; spells to keep the

  terror at bay; currency to buy salvation.

  Matthew, Mark, Luke and John

  bless this bed that I lie on.

  Before I lay my head to sleep

  I beg thee Lord, my soul to keep.

  Two hours later:

  Fear cramps me into panic; hysterical

  I beat frantically, futilely at the sides.

  2 inches is inadequate leeway; I only

  brand dull thumps onto taut knuckles.

  Three hours later:

  Counting out time on beads of sweat

  to keep from going insane. Mental

  arithmetic. 2678 divide by the pie of 7.

  Nursery rhymes work also – except when tears

  muffle memory.

  Four hours later:

  Blank face, blank black eyes stare; icy

  dense darkness; free falling, nothing below

  except inky space sucking me into maw.

  These are some of my nameless terrors.

  Five hours later:

  Water is thrown over the metal to cool me.

  Through burning steam I see

  a man in dazzling robes; face, a thousand suns

  coming towards me; leading to light . . .

  Six hours later:

  ‘. . . Jesu, Jesu, Jesu . . .’

  chants bubble through blisters.

  ‘Poor devil’, someone in the cell mutters

  ‘Shut up fool!’ another snarls.

  Someone else, too impatient

  to reach the hole in the floor

  stands arms akimbo

  spattering my face with urine.

  ‘Thank you, thank you . . .’ I mumble

  as the hot ammonia stings me

  into life.

  Eden

  Burping fumes and stenches

  we squelch through the swamp to

  the clearing in the centre.

  Bubbling mud cauldron sighs contentedly

  displacing corpses; hands scratching weeds,

  smiles – green, brown – sludged.

  We settle down to work under eyes

  of guards smoking, hunched in shade,

  vultures picking the bones of our pain.

  In pairs we throw bodies into the shallow

  pit along with vomit.

  And the swamp sucks our feet in sleep,

  dreaming us into wet intestines; waking

  us, screaming, sweating.

  People will do anything to get out of

  graveyard shift. One man drops a heavy

  concrete block crunching toes to mush.

  But they hobble him along with a spade.

  ‘. . . before you join dem dere . . .’ they

  threaten nicely, not forgetting to say please.

  The stench, guilt, burnt into nostrils never leaves

  you hugging cloying cheap cologne on a hot day

  that will not wash away.

  Paper Doll

  Christiana we call him,

  this caricature who wears

  prison shorts torn into a skirt and stains

  himself with plant dye.

  Fluttering at anyone who pays

  attention he offers to suck cock

  for ten cigarettes, fuck for thirty.

  Anything else costs from five packs up.

  ‘It’s not that I like to sell myself cheap,’ she told

  me one night, smoke rings mugging her.

  ‘It is just that I have to keep busy, you see,

  because idle hands is the devil’s workshop.’

  Tattoo

  Saddam.

  Even the guards call me that. Few people

  want to know my real name.

  Here

  Everybody goes by an alias.

  Perhaps it is to avoid intimacy.

  Dangerous

  when you might be burying your

  best friend the next day, or

  Superstitious

  belief we can evade

  death and the guards, live just one hour longer.

  Perhaps

  we believe we are protecting family

  afraid that they might also pay for our dreaming.

  JJ,

  Kojo, Mambo, Kingfisher, Vampire,

  Lucifer, Echo, Tango, Akula, even Coltrane

  Hide

  behind these facades. I play the game

  too. John James knows my real name.

  Invisibility

  stalks our every step. Some men brand,

  with cashew sap, their names on buttocks, stomachs,

  Hidden

  from view. A welt to remind them of

  who they really are, their past, their only hope.

  An English Gentleman

  Mixed race parentage can have

  its advantages here.

  Smiled sweetly in an

  English accent

  ‘Good afternoon Sir. Did you want

  me to join the execution line?’

  Often guarantees reprieve, a hasty

  ‘Not you. You are a gentleman.’

  Some treat me with disdain, call me ‘bat’

  Neither of sky, nor ground.

  Others defer to me, carrying over the belief

  that any hint of whiteness is next to godliness.

  Some are indifferent, treating me like a

  prisoner on death row. Ruthlessly.

  To some I am a rabid vampire feeding

  on their humiliation.

  Territorial even in suffering.

  Waiting for Godot

  Jeremiah on death row,

  has not been tried – or formally charged.

  But it’s only been seven years. He is

  an infant ‘awaitee’. He

  killed a soldier who shot his

  seven-year-old son for breaking a window

  with an errant football.

  John James is teaching him to read

  from stolen Marvel comics, newspapers and pagesr />
  ripped from Enid Blyton and Biggles.

  With lights-out comes the silence,

  predatory, malevolent.

  Echoing comfortingly, the sound of Jeremiah

  straining words through shrouded candlelight

  like seeds through a sieve.

  ‘What’s up, Spidey?’

  ‘Damn, I’ve run out of

  webbing.’

  ‘Jerry at four o’clock, Biggles.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s the Cloaked Crusader!’

  Casual Banter

  Sergeant Adamu Barkin Zawa

  rammed the barrel

  of a rifle – Lee Enfield – up my rectum

  maintaining casual banter;

  ‘How is your mother? How is she

  finding our lovely country?’ interrupted only

  by the blood spraying from my backside,

  baptising his heavily scarified face,

  empty ancient mask.

  Breath heavy with local gin – ogogoro – used

  to scare demons, guilt, into lonely

  dark corners.

  Haunted by screams,

  John James dying shamelessly,

  he sits under the moon howling, torn apart.

  Compassion cups my hands through the bars

  to try and console,

  or is it kill,

  this man.

  Sergeant Adamu, decorated murderer of Biafra,

  specialising in women, children.

  We find him leashed to the execution tree

  by leather army-issue belt,

  smelling faintly

  of mangoes.

  Boddhisatva*

  There are others . . .

  Lieutenant Hyacinth Leviticus Nwankwo.

  Officer in charge of torture and

  interrogations, self-appointed redeemer.

  ‘What does it profit a man to gain

  the whole world but lose his soul?’

  he asks, coaxing confessions with a pair of pliers.

  ‘If your right arm causes you to sin . . .’

  he intones as his machete butters

  through flesh too surprised to bleed.

  Or flogging, bull whip burning Satan,

  he drives the demons from

  this holy sanctuary, the Lord’s temple.

  ‘Do not die in sin,’ he urges those

  too hard to break or who have nothing to say.

  ‘Accept Jesus as your personal saviour.’

  Other times, he sits in, watching

  his many apprentices practise detailed

  knowledge of human anatomy

  while mumbling prayers,

  fingering a rosary made from the teeth of

  his favourite dead prisoners.

  * Buddhist. Enlightened being. Teacher of faith.

  Koro*

  Sodomites row.

  Dreaded more than the box; or

  solitary.

  Hyacinth Leviticus Nwankwo’s

  favourite punishment, supervised

  personally,

  is to leave some hapless new

  prisoner overnight in these cells,

  not forgetting

  to spread the rumour that he is

  a rampant sodomite with a touch

  of sadomasochism thrown in for flavour.

  We can hear the screams clear

  across the courtyard, even with dirt

  stuffed in our ears.

  * Yoruba slang for dark alley.

  Mephistopheles

  Lt Emile Elejegba loved nothing more

  than a good debate about

  who was the better writer: Zola or Balzac.

  And did Dostoyevsky not plagiarise

  St John and Revelations a little too much

  As against Tolstoy’s more original ideas?

  Plato and Artistotle he maintained

  stole all their concepts from Yoruba mythology

  or else were illegitimate children of Oduduwa.

  He hated Kiri Kiri and the brutality,

  but was posted here, demoted, as

  punishment for his refusal to

  lead a troop into Ogoniland to

  murder fellow compatriots. Back

  then he was a captain.

  I was summoned often to his office

  to do ‘paper-work’. He would

  leave me alone to get on with it

  After cautioning me not to read

  under any circumstances the copy of

  Anna Karenina on his desk.

  Good Friday

  Day burnt down to purple embers,

  fanned by egrets, unrolling black velvet.

  Sounds of night vault the high walls

  falling in loud heaps at our feet to be

  kicked aside as we shuffle to dinner,

  black eyed beans, stale yam, boll weevils.

  I shunt the tasteless food,

  crunching noisily on the weevils, listening to

  John James and Jeremiah arguing about

  X-Men and Apocalypse, goodies vs arch-villains.

  ‘But why fight a foe you can never beat.

  It seems futile to me’, Jeremiah argued.

  ‘It does not matter whether you win in the

  short run. What is important is that you fight.’

  ‘Isn’t that right?’ John James asks me.

  I nod absently, distracted.

  I wish I had paid more attention that night. Those

  were the last words John James spoke to me.

  They took him in the morning. Three days later,

  on his birthday, he died. Smoked to nothingness.

  Ode to Joy

  John James, 14,

  refused to serve his conscience up

  to indict an innocent man.

  Handcuffed to chair, they tacked his penis

  to the table

  with a six inch nail

  and left him there

  to drip

  to death

  3 days later.

  Risking death, an act insignificant

  in the face of this child’s courage,

  we sang:

  Oje wai wai,

  Moje oje wai, wai.

  Incensed,

  they went

  on a

  killing rampage.

  Guns

  knives

  truncheons

  even canisters of tear gas,

  fired close up or

  directly into mouths, will

  take the back

  of

  your head off

  and many men

  died singing

  that night.

  Notes caught

  surprised,

  suspended

  as blows bloodied mouths,

  clotting into silence.

  Caliban

  Fear grows on you,

  smooth like well worn trouser buttocks.

  Inmates devise elaborate schemes to

  keep from being released, because

  after twenty years in hell, heaven is too

  terrible a possibility to contemplate.

  Akula in cell block H, the deadliest men,

  cannot live on the outside. He kills and

  eats nearly all his room-mate. The guards find him

  picking his teeth with small finger.

  They kill him slowly, cutting him up piece

  by piece, forcing him to eat himself.

  The Hanged Man

  Owusu

  is not even a Nigerian.

  He came from Ghana looking

  for work.

  The foreman

  at a construction site,

  a corpulent Igbo, asked to

  sleep with his sister

  as a reference.

  Having no relatives near

  he produced his girlfriend.

  ‘Why?’ I asked incredulously

  ‘She love me,’ he smiled.

  Classic story. Someone s
tole some

  tools. The foreigner was

  fingered. Kiri Kiri next stop.

  Receiving advance notice of

  his impending death he

  pulled out his solid gold tooth by

  tying string to it and

  slamming a door.

  Handing the still bleeding tooth

  to me, he asks me to