Since last week Saturday, Nwagwu has
been mourning with the people of Nepal over the earthquake. That country’s
remarkable landscape provided inspiration for his recent poetic efforts Cat Man Dew in which he eulogises the
innumerable virtues of his wife, Helen. In this interview with Anote Ajeluorou,
Nwagwu describes his emotions at the tragedy and what the world can do to help…
Your heart must be with the people of
Nepal at this tragic moment. Could you describe how you feel?
My feelings are of devastation as though I was
buried in the craters of the earthquake. The world we live in is ever a mystery
to me, when such enormous pain wells up in my heart. For I ask, how could
people suffer so much?
When I first learnt of the earthquake last
Saturday, I was severely troubled, but then Saturday in the holy, Catholic
Church, was the feast of St. Mark, my name-Saint, so I was in a celebration
mood. And when we got to Mass the following day, Sunday, the choir sang an
entrance hymn, praising God, telling him we have come to thank him and to
receive his blessings. Whenever I hear this hymn, I can say my eyes dance. That
is precisely why I go to Mass to thank my God and receive his boundless
blessings which he pours down on me without my asking for them.
So, you could say the good Lord got into my
soul and quickly healed the wound with his blessings. So the initial trauma was
thus ameliorated.
My pain is all the more exacerbated by the
news that the earthquake shook mighty Everest and it resoundingly threw up
avalanches down the slopes with several mountain hikers trapped therein and
killed. To hear that anything at all happens to Everest rocks my frame, leaves
me subdued and defeated. My dear wife and I were in the Himalayas and we saw
Mighty Everest standing there in all her singular powers surveying all of God's
creation with telescopic eyes. Your whole life changes after you've seen
nature's masterpiece and you get down on your knees feeling little and humble,
and thanking God for his mighty works. My poem on Everest will see the pages of
my next book, God willing.
Your poetry collection Cat Man Dew has Nepal's capital as
title. What was in your mind at the time?
Choosing the title of my book was a work
between my publisher, Book Builders Ltd, and myself. We went through a number
of titles and she then threw up Cat Man
Dew and I immediately fell for it and screamed in boundless delight that
finally we had a title that captured my thoughts and feelings of heights
unsurpassed in a number of the poems. And she did the cover of the book also
which has a number of peaks rising higher and higher. But we did not want to
use Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, as the readership in Nigeria might not take to
the foreign caption. We spun the word, Kathmandu, on its head and came up with
Cat Man Dew, which was ideally poetic. My publisher did a great job here.
How does celebrating your wife align
with Nepal's capital?
Now that you ask me this question, I've gone
back to the book and I find the answers all over the place. First, there
is the poem ‘Everest’, where I say that I won Everest in prize but could not
get there for on scoreless seas I sailed. I, therefore, buried Everest in hills
of waters, then swam to buried peak,
the prize is
won
Helen.
On next page,
you have the poem, ‘The Himalaya of my being’, where I celebrate my dear wife,
Helen.
In this context, Kathmandu, The Himalaya and
Everest are all one, easily transposed one to the other, and wonderfully
identified with Helen, who is both a mountain Everest, and a valley, Kathmandu,
from where you can sight the mountain. You see, she's both, the Himalaya of my
being!
What special place does that city hold
for you and your wife?
There is one and only one Everest. There is
one and only one Himalayas. There is one and only one Kathmandu. There is one
and only one Helen. I have Helen and I feel I have all of them living in me, as
she does.
Our daughter, Ugochi, her dear husband,
Onuora, and their children lived in Kathmandu at the time in a house of such
historical status that it drew us into the Nepalese people. I knew a little of
this history but since it was mainly of an imperial dynastic nature, I would
not like to dwell on it. What was interesting was the march toward a modern
state and the different intrigues of the parties to control power. My dear wife
and I have great admiration for gardens and greens and the outdoor, though, I'm
sorry to say the only house we have on this earth, in my hometown, Nguru, in
Imo State, does not speak this language of elegance and bliss.
My dear wife went on a hike of over five
hours outside Kathmandu and fell in love with the cheerful scenery. She left in
the morning and came home at night in time for dinner, exhausted but
exhilarated that she saw so much of the people and the mountains.
Every morning, we basked in the garden sun
where I was able to write my second novel, My
Eyes Dance. This joy is captured in my poems, A Kathmandu Christmas, where I sing my Christmas joy traveling all
over the world to Kathmandu, and from there to Bethlehem eternal; a Christmas
Kathmandu, where I wrote about our 2009 Christmas Day
‘out in the
sun from twelve to two...
collapsed
into eternity Christmas hearts take flight
seeking new
heights wings flapping in fury
to the top of
the world Everest capped in snow..
take solar
heat to stable colds
keep Infant
Jesus warm
in a
Christmas Kathmandu’
We were able
to go to Mass every morning at the home of Reverend Sisters who ran a non-fee
paying school for children. My daughter and family lived mere minutes from the
Sisters and the Reverend Fathers would ride their bike to the home to say Mass
for the community. We made friends amongst the priests and sisters and were
often invited to share breakfast with them. The day we left Kathmandu to return
to Nigeria, we were treated to a special feast.
A dear friend of ours, Fr. George
Kalapurackal,
who was the parish priest in a local church we attended on Sundays, responded
to my Facebook inquiry that he was safe, asking that we pray for his people of
Nepal. And we are praying. You can see we had a whirlwind of a time in
Kathmandu, certainly one of the finest times of my life with my dear wife Helen
and our children and grandchildren.
From Kathmandu, on a clear day, you would see
the Himalayas. In fact, from the corridor upstairs where we lived, we could see
the Himalayas. What a blessing, unsurpassed.
The poem, ‘On
Desert Waves to Himalaya’ tells it all. It is a sestina, with the six words,
Timbuktu, Niger, Africa, Kathmandu, Himalaya, Eyes, repeated at the end of a
line, in six stanzas, in different arrangements. It is a long poem so. I bring
it in here for you to capture in some form how the Himalayas and Kathmandu
live, love, and dance with our Timbuktu, Niger, Africa and Eyes, represented by
Helen. It is one of my dearest poems unrivaled in unity and love in the life I
live!
Does the earthquake echo a line or two
in that collection, positively or negatively?
You know, poetry is not just what you write
down in words. There is so much that is said in those words and sometimes much
more that is not said in words but sensed from the whole body of the poem. I must
say, though, I pour my thoughts and mind into my poems and so the tale they
tell is not difficult to make out. Still, because my poems stretch into
surrealism and escape into space from the boundaries of what is seen and heard,
the words stride along heedless of anything around them. I have gone through
the poems in Cat Man Dew and each of
them lifts me up to heights not reachable on this earth.
As I said earlier, the Himalayas, Kathmandu
and Everest capture my love for my dear wife and speak all I can say about our
life together for the 50 years celebrated in the poems. I have searched through
the work and do not find the word earthquake, but I can tell you I often regard
to meeting Helen as an earthquake that shook my footing, threw me up in the wind
and I landed flat on Helen's eyes where she can see me and rescue me. There is
a poem at the very end which somehow captures something both positive and
negative about our tomorrows. I'm leaving it to the end.
Will you make any physical contributions
to help out?
I wish I could fly to Kathmandu and there
help out in any way I can. Alas! This is not possible and so my dear wife and I
have asked Ugochi and Onuora to make a donation on our behalf to help the
survivors. I intend to raise the consciousness among my colleagues here at Paul
University, Awka, of the enormity of the catastrophe and ask for their prayers.
How best can Nigeria help?
Nigeria can send immediate relief to
alleviate the catastrophic suffering in Nepal in whatever way and by whatever
means they can. The government should without any delay send help and invite
companies, industries, institutions, and individuals to do the same. The
government should set up registers where we can all express our condolences for
the dead and sympathy for the injured and make a donation which the government
can send through proper channels to Nepal.
During the week I saw on TV that an actor,
Joanna Lumley, a British actress, was leading the U.K. relief effort to save
Nepal. Can I do the same, you might ask? And I'll quickly offer my apologies
that age is not on my side and public activities of this nature these days will
not find me a willing participant. Surely, someone else could step out and
help.
Is poetry enough in this dire hour?
Of course, poetry is not enough; nothing can
be enough! We need to withdraw into ourselves and live out the true meaning of
our life, knowing that yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come. We
have only today to live our life to the fullest in true image and likeness of
God. All else is dross. And so the dead by whatever may be the means of their
death are before their Maker to give an account of how they have lived this
life in love.
Yes, this is the moment I recall the last
poem in Cat Man Dew, titled ‘Boneless
Tomorrows’:
graves
immortal sepulchres scriptural
paint
portraits of eternity spiritual
rivers of joy
from gardens in embrace
flow into
depths lifting the bones
airs bear
souls of my fathers
to boneless
tomorrows
depths
prophetic announce new moons
flesh them
out in new todays
alive they
arise no longer fixed in time
ascend into
years long since gone
my bones in
pursuit seek marrows of time
the present
into yesterdays now live in me
