J.O.B. Parables
A sampling of blogs, short stories, essays, poems, screenplays, and news articles.
I want you at my funeral when I die and
Mmensɔn [1]—
Seven ivory horns—blown till my
Swansong
Drops me in kelter until I’m
Lowered away from you.
Except,
I need you at my funeral when I die and
Mmensɔn.
But six men with ivory horns will try
And sing-song
My dirge with seven horns; why?
If there’s you, my never-bride,
Ivory lady lovely bosom you.
Yet,
I want you at my funeral when I die and
Mmensɔn!
You seventh ivory horn; blow till my
Sing-along
Droops in muddy shelter till I’m
“Lover” never again to you.
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[1] Pronounced: MEN-SONG. A septuplet of Ashanti ivory horn players
SEO-optimized Blog post for The Men With Tools
A sooty man with his own cock in his mouth.
Pay rapt attention. You need a sooty man with his own cock in his mouth for this type of funeral. Man is a cock. That’s what our people say. Before a funeral of this magnitude is ever staged (I’m talking about the funeral of a prominent Ashanti man or woman), the funeral organizers must find a man. Preferably one who is related to said Ashanti dignitary. Preferably one who rears chickens. It doesn’t matter if the man is a poultry farmer or not. It doesn’t matter if he simply raises his flock as a hobby or not. If he has a cock in his barns, then he is eligible. Man is a cock.
Now, the funeral organizers have to strip him naked. With an abundance of charcoal, they must thoroughly soot the man’s entire corporeal frame until he’s matte-black. To protect the man’s dignity, however, it is imperative that they secure his crotch with a red loincloth. A red loincloth. A red loincloth. The loincloth must be red. Pay attention. Man is a cock.
The man must then pick a cock. The largest rooster he has in his barns. On the day of the Ashanti dignitary’s funeral, the sooty man will dance several victory dances with his biggest cock in his mouth. But first, he will tie down the rooster’s legs with jute rope. Second, he will fill his calabash with a generous amount of palm wine. Next comes the pouring of libation.
With drops of palm wine from his calabash satiating the parched Ashanti soil, the sooty man will quench the thirst of every single god, demi-god, spirit, and ghost, starting with the Supreme Being, to Asaase Yaa—the earth goddess—to the ancestors, right down to the dead relative, each of them summonsed according to their hierarchy within the Spirit Realm. Then, he will drink. And drink. And drink what’s left. Until he speaks palm wine, i.e., the language of the gods. He will grab his big cock. Clutching its beak and tied feet with both hands. And then, he will gently bite the back of the rooster’s neck. Nibbling. Gnawing. Gripping. Until he has his cock in a tight grip. Without killing it. The rooster will crow. Flap its wings. Try in vain to scratch its captor with its feeble talons. But it will fail. Then, slowly, the rooster will accept to its fate. Trapped in the canines of that dark hunter. Prey to one who used to feed and nurture it. Man is a cock.
So it is with us. When a human being is born into the world, the elders say its cry is like the crowing of a rooster as it heralds the dawn of a new day. That new birth signals the dawning of a new creation. That new human is like a rooster. Mankind is like a cock. Man is a cock.
Yet, the rooster is hunted by one greater than it. The eagle. Mankind is hunted by one greater than it. This Great Hunter, the elders swear, is Death. Death. Death. Greater than hunters living and dead, Death hides in the shadows of human carelessness, carefulness, wantonness, wants, and apathy. Death always finds its prey…even the prominent Ashantis. And this is why the Ashanti people have a man-is-a-cock performance at the funeral of their greats. It is an elaborate homage to Death and its 100% record. The man in soot represents Death.
Man is the cock.
My late uncle, Enoch Peasah, was a prominent Ashanti man. At his lavish funeral in Kumasi, Ghana, however, members of his own clan debated whether he had lived a life deserving of a man-is-a-cock ceremony. Those who had enjoyed his monthly Western-Union-sent remittances from Oklahoma to Kumasi argued that he had indeed lived a life meritorious of our ancient custom. These old men and women had even gone as far as to choose Koduah (some cousin of another paternal cousin’s uncle’s nineteen-year-old son) to play the role of man-is-a-cock at Uncle Enoch’s funeral. Mind you, Koduah did not own or rear any chickens. Neither did his parents. And members of the opposing side of the debate were quick to pounce on this.
No! It wasn’t because they were jealous! No! Money had nothing to do with it. No! It wasn’t because they felt Uncle Enoch had slighted them when he refused to send them some of those American dollars like he regularly did with the others. No, no, no! It has nothing to do with that at all! They argued.
To this other half of the Asona clan, Uncle Enoch’s death was seen as an act of God. Uncle Enoch’s American kids, friends, and well-wishers who had flown to Ghana for the funeral wouldn’t get it, you see. Even though these foreigners agreed with their fellow Ghanaian mourners that death by tornado was such a freakish way to die, they could never comprehend it on an Ashanti level. Because it goes deeper when you’re an Ashanti; when you are an Ashanti; when you are an Ashanti; trained in the old ways; trained with spiritually judgmental eyes so that you see things for what they truly are, and not what they appear to be.
To this other half of the Asona clan, they saw that tornado which upended Uncle Enoch’s Porsche Cayenne on the super two-lane in Hennessey, Oklahoma, and swept him into the afterlife, as a comeuppance for his refusal of the Ankaase throne. To them, had Uncle Enoch accepted his nomination as king, he wouldn’t have lived those 4 long decades in America. And he wouldn’t have died such a horrible death. Pressing, pressing, pressing, they pressed this point some more. Arguing that when the clan has finally bidden Uncle Enoch’s spirit goodbye into Asamanso[1], our ancestors would take him to task regarding the throne he had abandoned.
If he wanted to be buried like a king, why did he refuse his kingship? shouted an older woman! Exactly! Why was he so eager to sell fried chicken in a foreign land to a people who could only see him as cargo? another “well-meaning” aunt added. Why did he never return home? quizzed her “well-meaning” husband.
Why did he have to return to us in a coffin? lamented one of the professional funeral criers as she descended into a river of well-paid tears. Her antics, silly as they were, reminded everyone of the true tragedy here. The professional funeral crier approached the open, glossy, mahogany casket and wept at its feet. The entire Peasah courtyard fell deathly silent.
Displayed stiff like a caked semi-washed towelette in his open casket, Uncle Enoch looked like a man who had seen, heard, and done it all, and did not want to talk about it either. The clan had presented him in death exactly as he had lived in life. Pensive. Quiet. Boring. But Rich. Even the cotton balls they had placed inside his dead nose had some opulence to it. Still, for a man who could see around the corner of everything, Uncle Eno…[.]
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[1] The Spirit World
In Morrison’s Sula and Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus “silence is conceptualized in order to articulate how the dominant group employs it to regulate the existence of the subservient group around the margins [,] and how the subservient group attains power and agency in the subversion of the weapon of domination (silence) to negotiate their existence around the margins” (Okuyade 245). The pervasive silencing of female characters within these two novels is engendered and perpetuated by white-supremacist-phallocentric social, political, and religious institutions as well as ideologies. Through the characters of the adult Sula Peace and Aunty Ifeoma however, Morrison and Adichie countermand this prevalent silence respectively. The authors achieve this by ostensibly inhabiting the archetype of the West African griots. These griots—skilled musicians, storytellers, counselors, and entertainers—were “thoroughly professional [West African] artist[s] trained to use the subject matter of [their]… people's history as the raw material of [their] art… [They were]…therefore [both] historian[s] and storyteller[s]…[whose] art linked indissolubly the functions of entertainment and education” (Ayikwei 51). Although the role of the griot has traditionally been ascribed to male performativity, in Aunty Ifeoma and in mature Sula, “the most free-spirited and unconventional women in the novel[s]” become “strong representatives of what Adichie” and indeed, Morrison, take to be the strength of African women”: the strength of sheer verbosity (Duran 49). Just like their authors, Aunty Ifeoma and grown Sula evolve into new “griots” of sorts. They metamorphose into black females who tap into their West African oral traditions, ancestor veneration, and stories of old to rise above the contemporary stigmas of white supremacist and patriarchal expectations in their society. Hence, tutting a revolutionary tune of corporeal, economic, religious, and social freedom.
This paper will therefore discuss how these female authors of West African descent—these new “griots”—utilize their stories and characters to elaborate on Western-induced religious silencing and the violence that tends to succeed it, while reclaiming black vocal agency which has been long muted by colonialism and slavery.
Nigerian novel, Purple Hibiscus, commences with upheaval in the Achike home when the Calvinistic patriarch of said nuclear family, Papa Eugene, reacts violently to his son Jaja’s refusal to receive communion in church. Papa Eugene launches his Catholic missal, “which is supposed to be sacred, judging from his parochial sense of religion, [turning the missal into] …a missile…at Jaja, thereby destroying the figurines on the étagère. This scene sums up the entire narrative” (Okuyade 254). Employing flashback in the novel’s opening scene, Adichie traces the violently volatile Papa Eugene’s regimented silencing of protagonist Kambili, her mother Beatrice, as well as her older brother Jaja. Akin to an abused victim testifying before an audience, Kambili narrates from the first-person that she and her older brother tended to ask “each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know” (Adichie 23). Her voice becomes trapped in a superficially religious cadaver of a home. Compounded by her father’s mercantilist worldview. This remains her status quo until the arrival of her father’s sister, Aunty Ifeoma—a widowed single-mother who has crass disregard for Papa Eugene’s antics—whose effusively expressive personality and family subvert Papa Eugene’s suppressive authority.
Regarding Sula—this story of black sisterhood and friendship, motherhood and love—Morrison seems to echo the pertinent remark she once made in an interview in which she declares that, “’There was an articulate literature before there was print. There were griots. They memorized it. People heard it. It is important that there is sound in my books—that you can hear it, that I can hear it" (Basu 158). This griot-ic “sound” in Sula emanates from its titular character, Sula Peace, particularly in her bold verbose adult years. Tragedy hits during Sula’s tender youth when she and her bosom friend and foil, Nel Wright, witness the tragic drowning of one of their playmates. The disconsolate Sula presents a solution to Nel when the accident occurs, asking, “’shouldn’t we tell?’” (Morrison 170). However, Nel disagrees. Sula unfortunately acquiesces to Nel’s admonition to hush up on the matter which later becomes an unhealed trauma that will eventually undo their friendship. After having left the town of Bottom for pastures new, Sula returns to the underprivileged black town where she emerges as a challenger of the white-supremacist, classist, American patriarchal politics of respectability. Sula breaks all the traditional values in the society with her lecherous deeds and most definitely with her brutally honest words. She is thus named as a pariah and an evil to Bottom. But her life and death provide the counterbalance to all that should be said but is not being said in her family, in her relationships, and in her town, and especially, in her best friend Nel.
Therefore, in both Sula and Purple Hibiscus, there remain extant character arches in the main characters in which they progress from situations of oppressive silencing to a place where they can practice freedom of speech. Take Kambili for example who “struggles to make her mouth function within the totalitarian temperament of her father’s home… [and emerges] as a mere observer and victim, but as the novel drags towards denouement she realizes her voice and role in the home after her awakening” (Okuyade 245). Morrison takes the reader on a journey with young Sula who will not speak up about a tragic accident to a mature Sula who “‘is new world black and new world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female’” (Basu 158). Both authors—these new “griots”—expand on their themes on Euro-centered silencing and reclamation of black vocal agency by firstly, counterpointing the mutedness and verbosity in their characters; secondly, by exposing Western-induced religiosity as a cause of said silencing; and finally, countering Euro-imperialist silencing with Afro-centered orality.
Observe how…[.]
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Works cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. Harper Collins, 2003.
Armah, Ayi Kwei. “Sundiata, an Epic of Old Mali.” Black World, vol. 23, no. 7, 1974, p. 51.
Basu, Biman. “The Black Voice and the Language of the Text: Toni Morrison’s Sula.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 23, no. 3, Oct. 1996, pp. 88–103. Accessed 19 Nov 2020.
Duran, Jane. “Adichie & the West African Voice: A Focus on Women & Power in Purple Hibiscus.” A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu, James Currey, 2017, pp. 45–55. Accessed 19 Nov 2020.
Fubara, Angela. “Narrative Voice in Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” Cultural Dynamics of Globalization & African Literature, edited by Sandra Dixon and Janice Spleth, Africa World Press, 2016, pp. 97–106. Accessed 19 Nov 2020.
Gooch, Catherine D. “"Shall We Gather at the River?”: The Folklore and Trauma of Toni Morrison’s Landscape in Sula.”Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, vol. 18, no. 1, Mar. 2021, pp. 92–108. Accessed 19 Nov 2020.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage Books, 2016.
Okuyade, Ogaga. "Changing Borders and Creating Voices: Silence as Character in Chimamanda Adichie's Purple Hibiscus." The Journal of Pan African Studies (Online), vol. 2, no. 9, 2009, pp. 245-259. Accessed 19 Nov 2020.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020.