Excerpt of You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka
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IBA—For Those Who Went Before
I hesitate a moment to check if it is
truly a living me. Perhaps I am just a disembodied self usurping my
body, strapped into a business-class seat in the plane, being borne to
my designated burial ground—the cactus patch on the grounds of my home
in Abeokuta, a mere hour’s escape by road from the raucous heart of
Lagos. Perhaps I am not really within the cabin of the plane at all but
lying in a coffin with the luggage, disguised as an innocent box to
fool the superstitious, while my ghost persists in occupying a seat
whose contours have grown familiar through five years of a restless
exile that began in 1994. For my mind chooses this moment to travel
twelve years backward when, drained of all emotion, I accom- panied the
body of my friend Femi Johnson from Wiesbaden in Germany, bringing him
home in defiance of the unfathomable conspiracy to leave him in that
foreign land like a stray without ties of family and friends. And the
pangs that assail me briefly stem from the renewed consciousness of the
absence of this friend, whose thunder-roll laughter and infectious joy
of life would have overwhelmed those welcoming voices that I know await
me at my destination. Despite the eternal moment of farewell by his
open coffin in the funeral parlor in Wiesbaden, it was difficult then,
and remained continuously so, to reconcile that self with the absence
of a vitality that we had all taken so long for granted, his big but
compact frame in a box, immaculately dressed as though simply from
habit—be it in a double-breasted suit with a carnation freshly cut by
his chauffeur from the frontage garden, then laid ritualistically
beside his breakfast set, or else in his casual outfit, its components
no less carefully matched for all its seeming casualness, or his
hunting attire, which appeared selected for a genteel English
countryside ramble instead of a “rumble in the jungle.” Difficult to
accept the closed eyes that would bulge at some inspired business idea,
at the prospect of a gastronomic spread, at the sight of a passing
generously endowed female, or simply when charged with a newly
thought-up mischief—but always lighting up the space around him. Still,
I could not rest until I had brought him home, exhuming him from the
graveyard in Wiesbaden, and the clinicality of my motions at the time
made me wonder if I had left my soul in that alien graveyard in his
stead.
It must be, of course, the coincidence of the airline
that triggers such a somber recollection, in the main—that final
homecoming for Femi was also on a Lufthansa flight. And it was a coming
home for me also, since my moment-to-moment existence from the time of
his death until his reburial was in some ethereal zone, peopled by eyes
of the restless dead from distances of silent rebuke. I came back down
to earth only when he was himself within the earth of his choice, earth
that he had made his own: Ibadan. And it is this that now reinforces
the unthinkable and irrational, that this same Femi—“OBJ” to numerous
friends, business partners, and acquaintances—is not in Ibadan at this
moment awaiting my return, his sweaty face, black as the cooking pots,
supervising the kitchen in a frenzy of anticipation, with an array of
wines lined up to celebrate a long-anticipated reunion! Femi should be
alive for this moment. If any single being deserved and could contain
in himself the entirety of the emotions that belong to this return, it
is none other than OBJ, and he is gone.
It is a long-craved
homecoming, my personalized seal on the end of the nightmare that was
signaled by the death of a tyrant, Sani Abacha, yet here I am, trying
to find reasons for my lack of feeling, trying to ensure that it is not
just a mask, a perverse exercise in control, this absence of the
quickening of the pulse. It is that other homeward journey of twelve
years past that stubbornly sticks to the mind, that of a friend forever
still in a casket in the belly of the plane, I seated among the living
but stone cold to the world, conscious of this fact but only in a
detached way and wondering why I was still so devoid of the sensation
of loss. It could be, I acknowledge, the aftermath of the battle to
bring home his remains—plainly, it had left me drained of all feeling.
This return has not, so it must be that I have carried that home so
obsessively in my head these past five years that I am unable to
experience the journey as one toward the recovery of a zone of
deprivation. The absence of Femi, who persists in looming large, a
territory of dulled bereavement, is only a part of it. The adrenaline
had been secreted over time, stored up, and then—pfft—evaporated in an
instant, there being no further use for it.
Excerpted from You Must Set Forth at Dawn by Wole Soyinka Copyright © 2006 by Wole Soyinka. Excerpted by
permission of Random House Trade Paperbacks, a division of Random
House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
