“Idioms
of Hope”:
Tijan
M. Sallah’s Harrow Poems
Nibir K. Ghosh
Harrow: London
Poems of Convalescence by Tijan M. Sallah, the celebrity Gambian poet and icon of
contemporary African writings, is a unique departure from the usual
socio-political and cultural concerns that he addresses in his earlier works.
The poetic terrain in this slender volume, comprising eighteen poems and a
“Foreword,” is neither Africa nor America (where Sallah currently lives and
works) but a hospital in Harrow, London where, nursing his wounds, he sets out
to explore the veritable landscape of the soul crowded with myriad impressions
that range from the immediate to the timeless, from the explicitly particular
to the inherently universal. The volume is dedicated to Chinua Achebe and Nadine Gordimer, whom Sallah refers to
as “two dear friends; two great African heroes.” Sallah mentions in his
“Foreword” to the collection how the poems were the outcome of a near-fatal
accident, “the child of a harrowing experience in London,” that he had on the
night of October 12, 2000: “The poems in this volume were inspired by that
tragic episode…They were written in Harrow while convalescing from the
accident. Every day, I wrote one poem and read it when the Ward family came. It
became a liberating ritual, a catharsis” (10).
On
that fateful October night, narrates Sallah in his “Foreword,” when he walked
out of Sheraton Heathrow Hotel to get “a quick dinner” he was caught in unawares
when a speeding “saloon car” hit him with tremendous force resulting in
extensive fractures on his left femur along with bruises and lacerations. He
was rushed to the Middlesex University Hospital
in Hounslow, London where he underwent surgery
and was then transferred for recovery to The Clementine Churchill Hospital in Harrow (8-9).
The
prosaic rendering of the episode that one finds in his “Foreword” is described
in great detail in one of the longish poem titled “I Must Not Look Down” where
he reflects on his near-brush with death: “For a moment, I thought, as I flew
in the air,/ That death has suddenly beckoned me to final rest./ But, thank
Great Kindness, I was half-spared./ I now have to reflect and anticipate the
best” (25). As he lay in the surgical ward “like a wounded animal,/ Awaiting
surgery in painful delirium” he hoped to be rescued from the “pandemonium” of
anxiety, pain and anguish by the benevolent “Great Kindness” (27). Even a
cursory glance at this poem reveals Sallah’s intrinsic ability to transform
graphic prosaic details into exquisite lyrics suffused with rhyme and music.
As
a survivor, Sallah finds it comforting to reflect and meditate on the
significance of eternal spiritual values that we often tend to lose sight of in
our perpetual race for materialistic pursuits, “the world is too much with us”
syndrome that William Wordsworth had popularized in his own time. In the poem “Near-Death Experience”
Sallah records: “Near-death experience can be religious/ It turned my eyes to
the obvious/…./ That mindless seeking of silver and fortune/ Can lead to a
spiritual misfortune/ “It seems moderating the passions is the key,/…./ When we
are soaked in world-lust, engulfed in the tempting sea/ We should pray daily
and be mindful./ If nothing, to our own soul-yearnings be careful” (35).
This mindfulness for spiritual
and human values gives Sallah various perspectives to view the trauma of the
accident. On the one hand he observes, “Unable to stand on my feet,/ I
swallowed the throes of defeat./ …/ Dependency is the child of paralysis;/ I
have come to this after much analysis” (“Unable to Stand,”44), while on the
other he is quite reluctant to “sue” the driver of the car that hit him. He is
quite forthright in stating in “Some Friends Say”:
“Some friends say I should sue the driver,/ But I do not want to create a
paradise for lawyers./ I do not want to be in their garrulous game./ I do not
want to trundle to the courts for fame” (29). Rather than think of penalizing
the driver in any way, he allows his humaneness to come to the fore by
appreciating the driver’s gesture of heeding to his own conscience and stopping
“to cover me with his jacket” (“I Must Not Look Down” 25) instead of running
away from the scene of the accident.
The
collection takes one through numerous instances that highlight how the human
body and mind in torment and agony can draw strength and sustenance from small
mercies and endearing human gestures. In “Here I Lie Now” Sallah is quick to
appreciate how the love of the friends who come to visit him in the hospital
with “warmth in their faces” takes away his mind from the “Dickensian hell I
have been in” (13). Even when the Nurse attending on him jokingly says that his
funny gait suggests that he must have “stayed at the pub long last night,” he
doesn’t feel embittered or sour: “All I know is the nurse jokes with a certain
passion;/ I can only think of it as compassion” (“The Nurse Says” 19).
In
the poem “Tribute to the Body-Carpenter” he is visibly aware that his “mortal
furniture is broken” and that “My body is no better than a broken furniture/
Wobbly it is, and its music squeaks./ Looking like some animated painful
picture,/ I move slowly making sure nothing breaks” (16). Yet he feels impelled
to acknowledge his debt to the attending surgeon whom he refers to as the
“carpenter of scars,/ Who joins muscles and bones with herbs and bark” (17). He
reiterates the esteem he shows for the “Body Carpenter” (the doctor) in another
poem entitled “Next to God, the Doctor” where he says: “When in pain, next to
God, is the doctor…./ The doctor’s words ring true like God’s trombones…./ And
the prescriptions must be held with the sacredness of treasure” (20). While
dwelling on the healing touch that a doctor imparts through his skills, the
poet is reminded of Epicurus, the Greek philosopher, who saw pain and pleasure
as “Two sovereign principles” that “Nature bestowed on humanity” (20).
In
his famous essay, “The Convalescent,” Charles Lamb had remarked in good humor
about the predicament of the convalescent: “…what
else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to lie a-bed, and draw day-light
curtains about him; and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion of
all the works which are going on under it?” Unlike Lamb, Sallah in Harrow Poems shows his marked preference for allowing his roving mind and
sensitive soul to move from wallowing in self-pity in the depressing confines
of a hospital ward to encompass “all the works that are going on under” the
Sun. In “The Nights Can Be Long” Sallah writes: “I feel
tonight like a throbbing newborn,/ But with a history; so without the garment
of innocence./ I am conscious of the past, but helplessly forlorn;/ Waiting for
time to unfold to morning in patience” (14).
While
poems like “Mad Cow” and “The African Penguins” show the poet’s awareness
of contemporary events, poems such as “The Maid that Brings” and “A Lesson of
History” reveal the poet’s desire to see the present in relation to the past,
especially in the context of the English Empire. Harrow, which figures in the
title of the present collection, is also the location of “Harrow School,/
Where children of the British elite/ Get groomed for the high seat” (38). In
the present time many Asian children are also on the school’s role in keeping
with the idea of “The new rainbow-Britain drawn from the global sphere” (“The
Maid that Brings” 38). In an ironical tone Sallah remarks: “Britain is really a
great place,/ Open to all the world’s cultures and races,/ Wedded by this
English, this maxim-tongue,/ That flows like water, and to all belongs” (38).
The content of the poem helps one recall postcolonial discourses that can be
found in texts like The Empire Writes
Back.
The tenor and tone of “A
Lesson of History” is no less pungent. Here the poet juxtaposes “England
invaded by the magic/ Of aboriginal histories, a rich panache of lore, craft
and lyric” with the hard fact that “Empires also smell of aboriginal/
skeletons” (42). Lying on the hospital bed, the poet muses: “I lie down here in
this land of Empire./ After it has retreated, reflected, retired./ I am
reminded of Hindustan and Bantustans./ Of English incursions into indigenous
lands” (43). The poem ends on an ominous note imbued with a prophetic warning:
“I am reminded of suppressed histories, buried tongues./…./ England will become the world it
vanquished./ Convergence is the future of the invader and the anguished” (43).
Another
poem in the collection that needs to be mentioned specifically is “God Save
Us.” Here Sallah describes how he awoke one night terrified by a raging storm
“That roared all night like a hungry lion, scaring us from sleep” (22). He saw
the storm as Nature’s revenge on man for mindlessly playing with the
environment for material gains, violating thereby what Rousseau called the
“Social Contract.” Aware of the implication of “global warming” he pleads with
God thus: “God, save humanity from mindless terror on nature,/ Else, we are
doomed to suffer its revenge and torture” (23). It is significant that a
convalescent struggling to come to terms with his own pain and agony does not
withhold himself from thinking of pressing environmental issues that threaten
mankind.
Taken together, these beautiful lyrics can veritably be seen as the dispersed meditations of a sensitive soul in search of panaceas to assuage individual suffering as well as collective misery. If these “idioms of hope” could be for Tijan M. Sallah “a liberating ritual, a catharsis,” there is reason enough to believe that readers will find in this superb collection the urge and the inspiration to create what W.H. Auden outlined in the concluding stanza of his poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
REFERENCE
Harrow: London Poems of
Convalescence by
Tijan M. Sallah. Leicester: Global hands
Publishing, 2014. 56 pp. $ 14.99.
Re-Markings Vol. 14 No.1 March 2015. pp.102-106.
www.re-markings.com
- Nibir K. Ghosh
Chief Editor, Re-Markings
