Visitant on Tiptoe and Other Poems is Akwanya’s third and by all means his fattest
collection of poems, containing altogether over sixty poems spread out across
seven sections. There is ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta’ in which the persona is in
amazed if worshipful wonderment at a certain elusive facility in Mother Teresa
by which she seems to have carried out an otherwise forbidding life ‘cause’ almost
as if without effort, as if she has been ‘created/ for [the] cause;/ for this
cause given three or four times/ the normal size of soul’ (lines 2-4) with the
result that ‘in the face of the assignment/ no decision need be made/ no
thought exercised’ (9-11). But the almost incredible reposing of the facility in
her is not all the fascination for this persona; even more wonderful to him is ‘that it be granted a Mother Teresa/on moving
on/ to have impassioned another/ with a double share of that unmeasured soul’
(54-57). And this persona’s lingeringly enchanted tone may have already given
him away as this one impassioned,
Elisha-like, with a double share of that
unmeasured soul.
There is an anguished anxiety of
roughshod displacement in ‘Vision and Mission,’ and perhaps because it is such
a dreadful and mind-racking consciousness, the ultimate gesture is to banish
the thought:
Better not think of the day
of all the measurement by theodolites
and hardy pathfinders;
the roar
of great earth movers
and the fatal charge
for trees unconscious
of their history,
their burden,
the unsigned peace they tower
over’ (last stanza).
The
‘conspiracy’ in ‘A Statistic’ may already also pertain to the ‘bats’ of ‘Vision
and Mission,’ for the relentless voracious ‘encroachment’ that ultimately
displaces the bats from ‘their undisputed property’ well parallels the
‘statistic[ization]’ of the ‘poor’ in ‘A Statistic’ with a similar roughshod
unconcern, already signalled perhaps by
the flippant indifferent unnominality of ‘No one’ who will not take notice of
his victim, no matter ‘how many countless numbers of them,’ no matter if they
‘grow to eighty percent/ or ninety’. This unheard cry of a sufferer subsists in
‘Footprints Indelible’ though there is an underlying sense throughout that this
cry is unheard, cannot be heard because the inflicter of the suffering is the
primordial elements themselves. The result is that any manner of confrontation
will quite amount to hitting one’s head against
a wall to use the Underground Man’s idiom, that all the sufferer may do
is hope that the ‘killer winds/ hav[ing] leave/ to do
another try’ (50-52) will ‘perhaps finally dislodge [his] blight’ (53-54). But
even this hope is already weighted with dreadful foreboding, as the hearing of the
hitherto unheard cry, the oil-land’s in this instance, even for the brief
duration in the third stanza unleashes catastrophe and adversity to the
bafflement of oil-land:
Though your prayers have been heard
and ferocious winds unleashed
to drive far
and scatter
the evil brooding over you
they have levelled
whole towns in faraway places
so that you have watched
dumbfounded,
uncomprehending;
the Highs too have wandered
all over the north
spreading draught
and chill
and misery
and have given new traction to the Sahara’s
southern surge (Stanza 3).
The
same sort of hope is probably what is nursed by the ‘parents’ in ‘Best Names’
in regard to the ‘delicate bundle/ which served for some months/ as the centre
of their world’ (Stanza 2), being so invested with ideality, a cushioning
shock-absorbent facility which is more in the unreality of what may be than the reality of what is.
The brevity of youth, the relentless
advancement of ageing, and the curse ultimate of mortality are some of what
exercises poetic impulse in ‘Losses Yet to Go’ as ‘gullies [are]/ eroded on
either side/ by countless smiles’ over the rapidly accumulating years, while in
‘Home is a Feeling’ the exhausting terror of ‘run[ning] (line 8) from ‘hunting
parties/ suspicious of your antelope limbs’ (4-5) manifests the awareness of
this life-peril. There is a laborious quest for ‘refinement building to
perfection’ in ‘Under Rule’ with the frail supineness of ‘the merely human’
eternally threatening the accomplishment of the ‘settled existence’ in ‘The
Human Spirit’ where gratitude, a sentiment encountered already in ‘Losses Yet
to Go,’ reappears again, now as a category of industry which ‘folks’ live, love
and toil at (line 16).
In ‘The Wrestler’ age has already
wreaked havoc on youth wasting his muscles (stanza 3); with the result that
‘the wily old reaper’ can no more take him seriously as he well might ‘in his
days,’ if he charges ‘these days’ bare-handed for ‘a tumble in the sand’(line
3). The putting out of ‘both hands’ (18) despite that all the ‘energy’ left is
just what ‘he could charge/ bare hands with’ is itself a degree of resistance
of age’s rather peremptory enfeeblement of youth, a level of confrontation of
the monster, even if this is always already impotent, or as ‘Back on Track’ has
it ‘pathetic’ (21). So that ‘to fight down laughter’s/ splutter behind averted
hands’ (19-20) at these feeble ‘attempts/ in old age/ to get the good old
terms/ back on track’ (21-24) amounts to an act of generosity and benevolence
(17-18). For otherwise this resistance, the attempt to get the ‘good old terms’
back on track is enough grounds ‘more keen than the Christ’s sword’ (4-5) for
the unleashing of domestic strife and division.
But the lure of this pathetic
attempt may be premised on the sort of firm belief in ‘This World was Made for
Us’ that ‘this world was made for us’ (line 4), indeed ‘exists for us’ (6). At
other times as in ‘Right to Life’ it may spring from a nagging horror of a
dreaded ‘thunder/ spoken to the stricken ear alone’ (stanza 2) that drives the
persona to double anxiety and fearfulness. But it is in this poem also that the
persona discovers from this anxious horror ‘as nothing else could/ what [he]
secretly long[s] for/ some device of magic or science to make’ these necessary
fatalities of his being and existence a mere ‘folly richly instructed/ day by
day’ (Stanza 4). It may equally, in the light of ‘Best Things’ at least, derive
from a sense of the fervent temporality of these things, nominated ‘best’ in
the parlance of the poem, no matter how much diligence, and tender care, and
sleepless nights invested in the forestalling of their frustrating
impermanence. This sense of the demoralising frustration of transience is
heightened in ‘I Know at Once’ perhaps because now it is not so much the
longevity of ‘best things’ at stake as that of the persona himself, with his
acute consciousness of ‘the self/you want saved/beyond now/ beyond culture’
(stanza 3), a self he is ready to
displace even into fictionality if that is the price of rendering it eternal:
ah,
to climb into one now,
enfold my self
within its pages,
form my self into its characters
in indelible black!’ (lines 35-40).
The career of capricious and
rampaging evil, material and moral, in the guise often of murderous intolerance
whether theocratic or secular is the charm of poetic impulse in some of the
poems in the collection. And it may be artificial as in ‘The Difference,’
‘Twenty-first Century Civilization’ or ‘Adult Troubles’ where the
toddler-persona craning his neck to the point of dizziness from being so intent
on glimpsing the ‘unseeing eyes’ of those busy with technological and
scientific advancements, is rudely earthed by votaries of a grim god whose
appearance coincides with ‘endless [non]peace’ blighting every aspiration and difference in its intolerant unaccommodating shadow; or it may be
elemental as in ‘Conversation with Myself,’ ‘Sufficient for the Day,’ ‘Existences
Greater than Ours,’ ‘Democracy’ or ‘The Difference.’
There is the bewildering uncertainty
at the inscrutable workings of the elements and Providence in some other of the
poems, notably ‘Seasonal’ and ‘Easter I;’ and the paradoxical often
self-debilitating processes of very ‘civilization’ itself in ‘Easter II:’
oh, to have squelched like a cricket
under the rampant boots of the beginner and sustainer
of civilization.
In a number of the poems the
phenomenon of death is the poetry’s enchantment: the ambitious if daring
optimism looking to its ultimate defiance in ‘Last Enemy’ for instance. But to
the extent that this optimism is equally mutinous and recalcitrant to the
customarily nonnegotiable ordinations of Providence it must be accounted
Faustian, which means already the occultation of its innate self-defeatism. In
‘A Dream’ the terror is of the human personage ‘finding’ himself eagerly
‘awaited’ by the dreadful phenomenon, its ‘mysteries’ offered quite ‘forthrightly’
to his utter confoundment and horrification, especially as he has been led to
nurse a ‘hope’ that all ‘unprovided for effort will be mounted/ to save [his]
last gasp’ (‘Alive or Dead’). In ‘Bird of Passage’ death is perceived as the
frustrating signal of the futility and sheer vanity of very life itself and all
its endeavours—called not with envy
‘earth-bound compensations’ in ‘When You Grow Old and Knowing’—the fatal factor
of levelling everything sublime and base alike to the pointlessness and vacuousness of ‘a-bsolute equality.’ Which is arguably
the logic of the persona’s passionate longing in ‘When You Grow Old and
Knowing’ that the ‘lad retain ‘[un]like all the rest of us’ his craving and
striving for the ‘clouds,’ perhaps because this is one endeavour that does not
ultimately prove futile nor tiresome. But is this not precisely because the
kind of occupation here is in principle unattainable as opposed to ‘our
earth-bound compensations/ and dissipations’?
The present is contrasted to the
‘past/ comfortable and cosy’ as a nameless arbitrary dread in ‘Terror
Anonymous,’ and the desperate desire is to go to this ‘past’ or else ‘divert’
oneself by ‘rage and tears and throwing of stones,’ a miserable enough
rebellion as ‘glacial fear’ nonetheless goes on ‘eating/ and slowly grinding
your soul to dust.’
The vision of perversion and evil is
as ‘outrage’—political opportunism, religious bigotry, the vulgar obscenity of
war—in ‘There Comes a Time’ and ‘Amnesty.’ Their tenacious viciousness and
capacity to terrorize and agitate the human element is not just in the
corporeal pain and privation but also in the pervasive ‘randomness’ (‘There
Comes a Time’) of their operations ‘leaving out lulls altogether,’ not
‘following expected patterns’ (‘Amnesty’). Yet the singularly demoralizing
intensity of ‘Amnesty’ is that here even ‘God’ so long subsistent as the sole
infallible factor of retaining if only a wishful sense of moral stability seems
too to have become overwhelmed by and subsumed in the sheer preponderance of
the depravity and moral confusion:
Today
a sacker of a rebellious Arab city
receives a woman’s threat
of God’s anger!
What a pure, innocent babe
Dostoevsky would have shot back!
If you were God
where would you start? (lines 48-55).
And
might not the peculiar fortune of the ‘chap’ of ‘Visitant on Tiptoe’ be that
somehow in his own cosmos this sole factor of retaining a sense of equilibrium
still abides, ‘whose…hands…broke his fall/ snatched back [a nearly miscarried]
play/ from disaster’? Which is not to say that this fortune of survival is any
happier than the misfortune of those who know consummate catastrophe. For it
does not go unattended by agitation
and silent terror (VII. Survived). For Providence retains its bewildering
awesomeness in benevolence as much in malevolence; at all events it manifests
in either aspect as randomly, and indifferently. And though those who may
happen to have been ‘passed over/ without comment;/ for no reason’ (‘There
Comes a Time’) by the seemingly severer providential visitations such as the
survivor-chap of ‘Visitant on Tiptoe’ has—his whole career is a veritable
display of being ‘fed more than once/ into the gaping mouth of a crocodile/ and
withdrawn/ just at the closing of the powerful jaws: he loses his way almost irrecoverably
in a forest; he is fed ‘strong disinfectant’ by ‘an impish maid’ and recovered
luckily again by ‘the man with the scorpion’s remedy;’ he is ‘nearly taken in…war’
and then again ‘narrowly misse[s]’ the fatal lot (‘Visitant on Tiptoe’)—might
be more inclined to reckon existence fair
and just (‘There Comes a Time), and perhaps for that account themselves
happier, it would still be a lopsided summation of the case. For it cannot be
in the last analysis that survival here is any less severer lot than
non-survival; the fairness and justness of existence might turn out eventually
to be much more in the unvarying irregularity and arbitrariness than the
variety of lots. Anyhow it is the survivor who bears all the burden of memory,
vital and rancorous, of ‘fear of death’ (II. So Long Ago), of loss of dear
ones, the shoddy memorials staged for
these, and the cruelly tantalizing visions of their disembodied apparitions
that ‘were over before he was minded to take [them]/ by the hand’ leaving the
survivor with all the bitter agony of unaccomplishment; of ‘the silent terror’
of ‘something’ that may have been ‘missed,’ something so delicate that it
dictates the utmost caution to the ‘visitant’ who must return only on ‘tiptoe,’
seeing that
nothing of those days
must be shifted
from under the dust
settled over them…(VII. Survived).
