By Lansana Gberie
Syl Cheney-Coker, Sierra Leone’s most accomplishedwriter, has spent the better part of his life abroad, in the United States, Philippines, Nigeria. He has called Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, home for the past ten years. Cheney-Coker moved to Atlanta shortly after a stint as first writer-in-residence in Las Vegas, Nevada, which – the writer is the first to remind one – is known more for sin than high culture. The City of Asylum program in Las Vegas had been established by a rich casino entrepreneur with literary aspirations, working with Wole Soyinka, and upon Soyinka’s recommendation, Cheney-Coker became its first resident.
The honour was exquisitely deserved. Exile – as physical condition and as literary prop, or what he would call “spiritual condition” – has fired Cheney-Coker’s imagination through six volumes of poetry, two novels, a memoir, essays, and a forthcoming novel, the last of a trilogy which began with The Last harmattan of Alusine Dunbar, the winner of the Commonwealth Prize in 1991.
Cheney-Coker first went to the United States in his early 20s, in the 1960s, to study at the University of Oregon – on the face of it, an improbable choice for a middle-class young man who grew up in British-ruled Sierra Leone and heard about Oregon only when filling his application form. But the university offered him tuition to study journalism, to which he had found attraction largely because of his admiration for Sarif Eason and Ibrahim Taqi, two politicalnewspaper stars he followed closely as a schoolboy in Freetown. His poetic sensibility, already regnant while a boy, began to blossom at university; he knew he had found a calling. So was his political commitment, which began as opposition to Prime Minister Albert Margai’s desire to usher in a one-party dictatorship. But Siaka Stevens, around whom this opposition galvanised, turned out to be far worse: as Prime Minister and later President, Stevens, perhaps to the chagrin of his liberal supporters, shunned those democratic sensibilities to which Margai, however ambitious, was attached, and declared Sierra Leone a one-party: a process that Cyril Foray, his former foreign minister, described as “legal violence.” Worse, Cheney-Coker has lamented in an interview with British poet Stewart Brown for Index on Censorship in the 1980s, Stevens introduced “political banditry and political violence and murder into Sierra Leone politics,” replacing “a very civilized and tolerant society.”
Cheney-Coker watched these developments from a distance in horror; they reinforced his sense of physical alienation from his country and fired his imagination. His first volume of poetry, Concerto for an Exile (1973), was a direct result, he has said, of Stevens’ execution of Brigadier John Bangura, whom he perceived as a political opponent; he wrote “The Executed” (1975), a powerful meditation on political murder, in memory of his early hero Ibrahim Taqi, a leading light in the campaign against Margai, who was also executed by Stevens.
So, from the start, Cheney-Coker has been a political writer, deeply engaged with the larger current of affairs in his country; those lines of anxiety ultimately extended to all of Africa, the African diaspora, and the globe, the result of Cheney-Coker’s engagement with the politics of identity, race, neocolonialism, oppression. “I believe,” he wrote in an introduction to a volume of poetry published in 2015, “that my poems have always been linked by three common themes: the awakening of my identity; the pain of exile,and a basic concern for those whose humanity is sometimes threatened by others.”
The anxiety is visceral. “I think it is something I probably inherited from my mother, who was a fearless woman,” Cheney-Coker told me. “She was a loving, caring model, very alert to social justice, a strong sense of concern for humanity … I just did not like the idea of anyone being bullied, even when I was a child, because I came into this world, I might say, with two handicaps, which I mentioned in the memoir. One, my skin was very dark, you know…” Handicap? “Yes, it was sort of a handicap in in Sierra Leone at the time, colonialism, the stupidity of colourism, you know, foisted on black people, whether we were in the Caribbean or in Africa. When I was growing up in Freetown, I was occasionally provoked for my very dark skin. But the bigger handicap was that I was left-handed,and that was seen as some sort of defect. I felt prosecuted as a human being, so I can easily sympathize with otherpersecuted humans.”
Cheney-Coker’s memoir, published early this year, is called Jollof Boy: The Early Years; the title adapts the nickname that his Grandma Tucker, a matronly neighbour in Freetown, gave him because of his very dark skin: she meant Wolof Boy, believing that the skin tone resembledthat of Senegalese of that ethnicity, whom she adored. Cheney-Coker loved her for this.
The memoir, which he wrote upon the suggestion of Dr. Osman Sankoh, the ever-resourceful publisher of the Sierra Leonean Writers Series, takes the great poetthrough his first 30 years, ending at a moment when the trajectory of success as a writer had been set: a volume of well-received poetry, Concerto for an Exile, published, a visiting professorship in the Philippines, the beginning of a happy family life. With the publication of the memoir, Cheney-Coker said, his work was done. “I have said my piece,” he concludes, “and now I lay my pen.” He turned 80 shortly after the memoir was published. Though aperennial expatriate, living thousands of miles away from his country of birth, Cheney-Coker says he feels very Sierra Leonean. When I called one afternoon, the writer was busy preparing cassava leaves stew (a Sierra Leonean favourite), which, he said, he’ll washed down with glasses of wine. He goes to bed very late and wakes up in the early afternoon. I got a sense while speaking to him on the phone that this routine was not to be interrupted: it was his writer’s quirk.
Jollof Boy refracts powerfully on Cheney-Coker’s life and work: his growing up in the east-end of Freetown (Paton Street), his college education in the United States, his love affairs (beginning with a married Mandingo woman, who he immortalises in a beautiful poem, through several, mostly white, women in the United States), his marriage to a Filipino woman following a professorship in her country, his acclaimed writing career. He clearly left an impression in the Philippines: Ambassador Evan P. Garcia, Philippines former Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, shared his memory of a pipe-smoking Sierra Leonean former professor of his to me as a form of compliment about how smart people from our country are. (I learnt from Jollof Boy that the pipe-smoking is serious business, not a prop; Cheney-Coker had started it when he was barely 20, as a sort of balm for a toothache; 60 years on he stills enjoys the lunting. In “Ode to my Pipe”, he writes. “At twenty, I had not smoked a cigarette/Since then, no fag has grown grass on my lips;/but the happiness of pipe-smoking has been my love…”)
I first read Cheney-Coker in bulk when I began to write my book on the civil war in Sierra Leone, beginning with his early poetry and then getting through The Last Harmattan. I have always felt that good fiction best captures the soul of a country, much more than political or historical accounts: facts may be ignored, elided ordisputed, but great fiction never lies. I had been mesmerised by Cheney-Coker’s early poetry, and though I had some difficulty with The Last Harmattan, I felt that its concentrated insights into the workings of tyrannical power was unmatched. But the work that I felt most encapsulates the writer’s passion and commitment, and that worked best for me as I tried to make sense of what was generally seen as a senseless war, was “Letter to a Tormented Playwright;” the poet has himself called it his “most humanist”.
Cheney-Coker wrote the poem after spending time with Yulisa Amadu Pat Maddy in London during a visit. The tormented older artist – playwright, novelist, dancer – had been briefly imprisoned by Steven’s government and had moved to live in London upon his release; there, he found work at a telephone office. He had written nothing at allafter his rather transgressive but not particularly distinguished first novel, No Past, No Present, No Future(1973), and had become somewhat dissolute, drinking heavily. With exact economy, the poem, which is addressed directly to Maddy, tells of Cheney-Coker’s meeting with Maddy “in the damp chilly English coffee shops” where they read poetry together; the younger more successfully poet urged Maddy to “remember… how terrible I said it was/that you were in exile and working/in the Telephone Office in touch with all/the languages of the world but with no world/to call your own; how sad you looked that winter/drinking your life…” The reader is captivated by the sheer intelligence and sympathy and passion of the poet as he is taken through the narrative, famous names dropping, towards the deeply movingconclusion: “but already the walls are closing around me/the rain has stopped and once again I am alone/waiting for them, the politicians of our country to come for me/to silence my right to shouting poetry loud in the parks/but who can shut up the rage the melodrama of being/Sierra Leone/the farce of seeing their pictures daily in the papers/the knowledge of how though blindfolded and muzzled/something is growing, bloating, voluptuous and not despairing/I say to you for now, I embrace you brother.”
I used these last lines to preface a chapter of my book, though the publishers had the stanzas mangled: but such is the charm of Cheney-Coker’s unaffected, vernacular register – like Auden’s – that they worked perfectly inprose form. This is the Cheney-Coker I came to cherish, the poet who so perfectly captured the anxieties and yearnings of a whole nation. I feel that Cheney-Coker’s poetry is among the very best that has emerged out of Africa; his volume of poems, Stone Child and Other Poems(2008) is, to me, the best war poems from Africa I have seen.
Identity
Before Cheney-Coker left Sierra Leone to study in the United States, he writes in Jollof Boy, his mother took himto “one of her fortune-tellers so that he could divine any future in that faraway place.” They found the wizened old man sitting, cross-legged, on a goatskin mat: “In front of him was a small enamel bowl of water containing some kola nuts; and very close to that bowl was his diving mirror.” Cheney-Coker remembers the precise details of the scene probably because what the fortune teller divinedfor him turned out to be prescient: he, brought up a Christian, found value – indeed validation – in what some others of his background would have regarded as heathen superstition. The experience, though brief, appeared to have been fundamental: he uses the scene in The Last Harmattan: it forms part of the basis of the literary technique he used in that novel and in Sacred River(2013), a technique that some critics have called “magical realism”, linking it to a genre that originated from the famed Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. Cheney-Coker disputes this interpretation but does not, advisedly, deny the influence. In the memoir he also mentions observing itinerant Tuareg traders hawking their cheap trinkets and other artisanal goods on the streets of Freetown and then suddenly disappearing from the scene, something that easily reminds one of the opening pages of Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; recently made into a fantastic Netflix documentary), which shows wandering Gipsies doing something similar and similarly exiting the scene.
It is a method forced upon Cheney-Coker by circumstance – an extraordinary effort of intelligence and sympathy, working from very thin material, that has helped him to overcome, with some success, what might be described as a structural disability.
“Nigerian writers of my generation came from a very rich background,” Cheney-Coker has noted, in an interview by a journalist that was published this year on the blog Poda Poda. Chinua Achebe drew from his Igbo society – a beautifully-ordered, integrated, complete society – to write his masterpiece, Things Fall Apart (1958); Wole Soyinka similarly drew from his confident Yoruba society. Cheney-Coker had no such society; and these writers were from an earlier generation, benefiting, particularly with respect to the novel form – which works best in such societies, and for which Achebe was an undoubted African pioneer – the wider appreciation of something new and exotic. To write The Last Harmattan (and then The Sacred River), Cheney-Coker had to invent a society – he called it Malagueta, which has resemblances but also differences with Freetown, an amalgam. And he had to draw deeply upon history and myth to do so, based upon his deep reading and his fleeting encounters as a child with fortune-tellers and Tuaregs. As a Creole, the descendant of repatriated Africans from different backgrounds – he discovered growing up that a large part of his heritage was Igbo – Cheney-Coker had to, he told a journalist, undertake “a subterranean journey… to find myself.”
The writing of Last Harmattan forced him to confront his identity as a cultural hybrid. In it, he had one of his characters, locked up in prison for attempting a coup, say this (doubtless about the Creole): “Modes of behavior long abandoned in the factories and gutters of England were still being copied with diligence by the despicable lot who made up the middle and upper classes. They were men and women whose other passion was drink tea in the afternoon in the ovens of their drawing rooms and parlous modeled on the antediluvian style of pre-abolition America while worrying about the cost of taking holidays in England.”
This, then, was an inauthentic society, a mimicry. It is, as he told me, Cheney-Coker’s view. He has created a term, Afro-Saxon, to describe people like himself from that society; and he expresses the sentiment fully in a poem entitled “An ‘Afro-Saxon’ Looks Back,” which is includedin The Road to Jamaica (published in 2915). It is his first use of the term, but the poem – part of a collection from 1968-1970 and 2012-2013 – is not dated; he did not tell me when he coined it, only that he first used it in that poem. I suspect that he came to it after The Last Harmattan; it is the voice of a mature, older poet: “With age, I can write about my two-navelled history;/theirs about mine; a middle-passage taste of/bitter brewed with my roots, the splintered/ancestral memories!” And: “I drank the torment of my people from that/Christian English teapot, the baptismal water, Easter liturgy/Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus, Bach’s Saint Mathew Passion/Our foreign catalogue of names/O proud, delusional souls!” Eldred Jones, from a similar background, long rejected this sort of characterization. In a 1968 essay, he wrote that the Creoles “as they celebrate their weddings with gumbe music or dance in evening dress to the strains of western-style bands, or talk to their dead during an awujo feast, or sing Bach in the choir on Sundays, seem quite unaware of their ‘rootlessness’, and display a surprising self-confidence”. But Jones, a great scholar and literary critic, was not a creative writer; not a novelist, like Cheney-Coker, and did not have to confront the difficulty in the same sort of way. Abioseh (Davidson) Nicol, William Conton and Lenrie Peters, though perhaps more erudite than their Nigerian counterparts of their generation, produced, when they attempted, negligible fiction.
Cheney-Coker, using inventive technique, has been a far greater success as a writer than all those three combined.Still, the lack of a deep social context shows in both The Last Harmattan and Sacred River: it is the reason why the implied criticism of their being in the mode of “magical realism” has persisted, despite Cheney-Coker’s spirited rejection of the term. The novelist is an outsider to some of the societies that he had meshed together to form Malagueta; his knowledge of them is surface: a young boy’s observation of strange Tuaregs on Patton Street in Freetown, an hour’s visit to a fortune-teller, a triumphant lay of a beautiful Mandingo woman. Perhaps inevitably, both novels are morally freighted, the main villain – a Siaka Stevens lookalike – coming to grief in the end; justice comes in the form of otherworldly intervention: the ancient gods always punished the despoilers of this world. It is a romantic view: for there is hardly ever justice in this world. This is in part because those who champion the cause of justice are often those least subjected to injustice; justice for such a pursuit becomes something of an abstraction. A peasant deprived of his land may get satisfaction when that land is returned to him, but there is little that can satisfy the intellectual idealist or revolutionary short of the destruction of their enemies: justice makes sense only as revenge. It is the reason why the struggle for justice often leads to greater enormities than its absence.
A Longing after Home
Perpetual exile, Cheney-Coker has said, is intolerable: he is determined to go home “for good” this year, he says. He has built a salubrious retirement home up at Leicester Peak; he had found inspiration after a visit to Soyinka’s massive eco-friendly home in Abeokuta.
“To be a writer,” Cheney-Coker recently told a journalist,“is to be consumed by a passion that no other expressive cultural form does to you because writing is a lonely vocation, as opposed to being a composer, a musician, or a painter.” The passion suffuses all his works, including his memoir, which ends with a swipe at some of the actions of the present government. But the criticisms are mild when compared to those he directed at Stevens: the old warrior seems to be mellowing. I told him that I would be visiting him in his Freetown redoubt when he does go back home, and he gave me an open invitation…
