Wizard of the Canon
(for Ngugi)
By Ndubuisi Martins
YOU would write when you wanted – and silence had no place.
You knew English, but the rhythm, deleterious to your mother tongue,
left you raging at its violence, pining for the roots of your being.
You left the table,
Chose to loosen the metal larynx of the English
and its cage of reason. You then touched their canons with a Devil’s spoon,
swore at the English that served who didn’t know the politics,
but you wouldn’t serve it.
Because Language is your technicity, Gikuyu came to electric resonance,
And they sought translation for the Wizard’s raw tales, luminous, and pristine.
The Wizard sleeps, yet his narrative throbs in the heart of the world.
No silence for prose you spawned from Mau Mau and the seasons after, of Africa,
still bent by the rod of extractive spoils, material violence, and lack. No pandering to a seat
with allegiance to tyranny of association
Feisty pen, Ngugi, you walked
tall and nimbly where the road was dark and colonial. You lit up the walk with light
from Kenya to China. You let a grain travel large and made us stories
that ask the postcolonial reader to probe language, identity, culture, Alfred’s motif, and their spreadsheet of grants.
* Martins, a Nigerian poet, poetry theorist and critic, is a doctoral candidate at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
