Not in defeat. Or cowardice,
but as a statement
of our
Discontent
with this state of barbarism we
live
Under
the shade of a tree
executions are mercifully shielded
from the harsh sun.
Killing Time
1900
hours.
Killing time. 12. Anointed.
Blindfolded. Herded by seraphs
wings tinged rusty by innocent blood.
Stapled
to a pock-marked wall by fear
steel bolts, ratchet bullets.
Shots crack
like so many branches.
Of 12, 8 fall.
Shirt, pencil and all.
I know I am alive
because
terror drips down my legs.
Jeremiah
Jeremiah
was 6 feet, 9 inches the last
time we measured.
Face,
knotted against
sun-hard pain,
unravels.
Smiles, spread hemp
tendrils.
Often
fasting, he passes his food to
weaker, needier men.
He
stood between guards and a prone man,
helping him up
to
die on his feet, knees only slightly
buckled, eyes kissing the sun.
The Box
Wooden frame with skirt of sheet metal
6 foot by 3 foot by 3 foot.
Pin-pricks of air burn holes on the negative
of my body; choking on my own smell mingled
with scent of seared hair and skin,
I taste my pungent mortality.
One hour later:
Religion unfurls in desperate splendour.
Silently through old man’s mumbling lips
prayers tumble forth; spells to keep the
terror at bay; currency to buy salvation.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
bless this bed that I lie on.
Before I lay my head to sleep
I beg thee Lord, my soul to keep.
Two hours later:
Fear cramps me into panic; hysterical
I beat frantically, futilely at the sides.
2 inches is inadequate leeway; I only
brand dull thumps onto taut knuckles.
Three hours later:
Counting out time on beads of sweat
to keep from going insane. Mental
arithmetic. 2678 divide by the pie of 7.
Nursery rhymes work also – except when tears
muffle memory.
Four hours later:
Blank face, blank black eyes stare; icy
dense darkness; free falling, nothing below
except inky space sucking me into maw.
These are some of my nameless terrors.
Five hours later:
Water is thrown over the metal to cool me.
Through burning steam I see
a man in dazzling robes; face, a thousand suns
coming towards me; leading to light . . .
Six hours later:
‘. . . Jesu, Jesu, Jesu . . .’
chants bubble through blisters.
‘Poor devil’, someone in the cell mutters
‘Shut up fool!’ another snarls.
Someone else, too impatient
to reach the hole in the floor
stands arms akimbo
spattering my face with urine.
‘Thank you, thank you . . .’ I mumble
as the hot ammonia stings me
into life.
Eden
Burping fumes and stenches
the clearing in the centre.
Bubbling mud cauldron sighs contentedly
displacing corpses; hands scratching weeds,
smiles – green, brown – sludged.
We settle down to work under eyes
of guards smoking, hunched in shade,
vultures picking the bones of our pain.
In pairs we throw bodies into the shallow
pit along with vomit.
And the swamp sucks our feet in sleep,
dreaming us into wet intestines; waking
us, screaming, sweating.
People will do anything to get out of
graveyard shift. One man drops a heavy
concrete block crunching toes to mush.
But they hobble him along with a spade.
‘. . . before you join dem dere . . .’ they
threaten nicely, not forgetting to say please.
The stench, guilt, burnt into nostrils never leaves
you hugging cloying cheap cologne on a hot day
that will not wash away.
Paper Doll
Christiana we call him,
this caricature who wears
prison shorts torn into a skirt and stains
himself with plant dye.
Fluttering at anyone who pays
attention he offers to suck cock
for ten cigarettes, fuck for thirty.
Anything else costs from five packs up.
‘It’s not that I like to sell myself cheap,’ she told
me one night, smoke rings mugging her.
‘It is just that I have to keep busy, you see,
because idle hands is the devil’s workshop.’
Tattoo
Saddam.
Even the guards call me that. Few people
want to know my real name.
Here
Everybody goes by an alias.
Perhaps it is to avoid intimacy.
Dangerous
when you might be burying your
best friend the next day, or
Superstitious
belief we can evade
death and the guards, live just one hour longer.
Perhaps
we believe we are protecting family
afraid that they might also pay for our dreaming.
JJ,
Kojo, Mambo, Kingfisher, Vampire,
Lucifer, Echo, Tango, Akula, even Coltrane
Hide
behind these facades. I play the game
too. John James knows my real name.
Invisibility
stalks our every step. Some men brand,
with cashew sap, their names on buttocks, stomachs,
Hidden
from view. A welt to remind them of
who they really are, their past, their only hope.
An English Gentleman
Mixed race parentage can have
its advantages here.
Smiled sweetly in an
English accent
‘Good afternoon Sir. Did you want
me to join the execution line?’
Often guarantees reprieve, a hasty
‘Not you. You are a gentleman.’
Some treat me with disdain, call me ‘bat’
Neither of sky, nor ground.
Others defer to me, carrying over the belief
that any hint of whiteness is next to godliness.
Some are indifferent, treating me like a
prisoner on death row. Ruthlessly.
To some I am a rabid vampire feeding
on their humiliation.
Territorial even in suffering.
Waiting for Godot
Jeremiah on death row,
has not been tried – or formally charged.
But it’s only been seven years. He is
an infant ‘awaitee’. He
killed a soldier who shot his
seven-year-old son for breaking a window
with an errant football.
John James is teaching him to read
from stolen Marvel comics, newspapers and pages
ripped from Enid Blyton and Biggles.
With lights-out comes the silence,
predatory, malevolent.
Echoing comfortingly, the sound of Jeremiah
straining words through shrouded candlelight
like seeds through a sieve.
‘What’s up, Spidey?’
‘Damn, I’ve run out of
webbing.’
‘Jerry at four o’clock, Biggles.’
‘Oh no, it’s the Cloaked Crusader!’
Casual Banter
Sergeant Adamu Barkin Zawa
rammed the barrel
of a rifle – Lee Enfield – up my rectum
maintaining casual banter;
‘How is your mother? How is she
finding our lovely country?’ interrupted only
by the blood spraying from my backside,
baptising his heavily scarified face,
empty ancient mask.
Breath heavy with local gin – ogogoro – used
to scare demons, guilt, into lonely
dark corners.
Haunted by screams,
John James dying shamelessly,
he sits under the moon howling, torn apart.
Compassion cups my hands through the bars
to try and console,
or is it kill,
this man.
Sergeant Adamu, decorated murderer of Biafra,
specialising in women, children.
We find him leashed to the execution tree
by leather army-issue belt,
smelling faintly
of mangoes.
Boddhisatva*
There are others . . .
Lieutenant Hyacinth Leviticus Nwankwo.
Officer in charge of torture and
interrogations, self-appointed redeemer.
‘What does it profit a man to gain
the whole world but lose his soul?’
he asks, coaxing confessions with a pair of pliers.
‘If your right arm causes you to sin . . .’
he intones as his machete butters
through flesh too surprised to bleed.
Or flogging, bull whip burning Satan,
he drives the demons from
this holy sanctuary, the Lord’s temple.
‘Do not die in sin,’ he urges those
too hard to break or who have nothing to say.
‘Accept Jesus as your personal saviour.’
Other times, he sits in, watching
his many apprentices practise detailed
knowledge of human anatomy
while mumbling prayers,
fingering a rosary made from the teeth of
his favourite dead prisoners.
* Buddhist. Enlightened being. Teacher of faith.
Koro*
Sodomites row.
Dreaded more than the box; or
solitary.
Hyacinth Leviticus Nwankwo’s
favourite punishment, supervised
personally,
is to leave some hapless new
prisoner overnight in these cells,
not forgetting
to spread the rumour that he is
a rampant sodomite with a touch
of sadomasochism thrown in for flavour.
We can hear the screams clear
across the courtyard, even with dirt
stuffed in our ears.
* Yoruba slang for dark alley.
Mephistopheles
Lt Emile Elejegba loved nothing more
than a good debate about
who was the better writer: Zola or Balzac.
And did Dostoyevsky not plagiarise
St John and Revelations a little too much
As against Tolstoy’s more original ideas?
Plato and Artistotle he maintained
stole all their concepts from Yoruba mythology
or else were illegitimate children of Oduduwa.
He hated Kiri Kiri and the brutality,
but was posted here, demoted, as
punishment for his refusal to
lead a troop into Ogoniland to
murder fellow compatriots. Back
then he was a captain.
I was summoned often to his office
to do ‘paper-work’. He would
leave me alone to get on with it
After cautioning me not to read
under any circumstances the copy of
Anna Karenina on his desk.
Good Friday
Day burnt down to purple embers,
fanned by egrets, unrolling black velvet.
Sounds of night vault the high walls
falling in loud heaps at our feet to be
kicked aside as we shuffle to dinner,
black eyed beans, stale yam, boll weevils.
I shunt the tasteless food,
crunching noisily on the weevils, listening to
John James and Jeremiah arguing about
X-Men and Apocalypse, goodies vs arch-villains.
‘But why fight a foe you can never beat.
It seems futile to me’, Jeremiah argued.
‘It does not matter whether you win in the
short run. What is important is that you fight.’
‘Isn’t that right?’ John James asks me.
I nod absently, distracted.
I wish I had paid more attention that night. Those
were the last words John James spoke to me.
They took him in the morning. Three days later,
on his birthday, he died. Smoked to nothingness.
Ode to Joy
John James, 14,
refused to serve his conscience up
to indict an innocent man.
Handcuffed to chair, they tacked his penis
to the table
with a six inch nail
and left him there
to drip
to death
3 days later.
Risking death, an act insignificant
in the face of this child’s courage,
we sang:
Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.
Incensed,
they went
on a
killing rampage.
Guns
knives
truncheons
even canisters of tear gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing
that night.
Notes caught
surprised,
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths,
clotting into silence.
Caliban
Fear grows on you,
smooth like well worn trouser buttocks.
Inmates devise elaborate schemes to
keep from being released, because
after twenty years in hell, heaven is too
terrible a possibility to contemplate.
Akula in cell block H, the deadliest men,
cannot live on the outside. He kills and
eats nearly all his room-mate. The guards find him
picking his teeth with small finger.
They kill him slowly, cutting him up piece
by piece, forcing him to eat himself.
The Hanged Man
Owusu
is not even a Nigerian.
He came from Ghana looking
for work.
The foreman
at a construction site,
a corpulent Igbo, asked to
sleep with his sister
as a reference.
Having no relatives near
he produced his girlfriend.
‘Why?’ I asked incredulously
‘She love me,’ he smiled.
Classic story. Someone s
tole some
tools. The foreigner was
fingered. Kiri Kiri next stop.
Receiving advance notice of
his impending death he
pulled out his solid gold tooth by
tying string to it and
slamming a door.
Handing the still bleeding tooth
to me, he asks me to