Lomba's Plaigerism

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of my MA thesis on Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel.

[...] The privileging of the imagination is key here. It is the prison superintendent’s lack of imagination that makes him appropriate Lomba’s poetry, oblivious to the possibility that Janice might fall in love with the real poet rather than his gaoler. He cannot imagine that Lomba might use the love poems as a way to escape. This failure of imagination is the fatal weakness of the prison superintendent. From the moment that Muftau reveals his vulnerable side, Lomba takes full advantage of the superintendent’s desire to impress. Much like Lomba’s neighbor on Morgan Street, the illiterate thief Nkem, who had attempted to impress Lomba with his English, Muftau attempts to impress Lomba with his knowledge of poetry: “Perhaps because I work in prison. I wear uniform. You think I don’t know poetry, eh? Soyinka, Okigbo, Shakespeare” (26). Although Lomba cannot express the sarcasm that comes to his lips when he reads Muftau’s first poem, he expresses it in the poems he writes for the superintendent’s educated lady-love. Muftau does not know poetry, but the teacher he wants to marry does. The superintendent’s claim to literacy also unintentionally supplies Lomba with his form of resistance: the first letters of “Soyinka, Okigbo, and Shakespeare” form a perfect “SOS.” Lomba appropriates lines and whole poems from other poets to send to Janice. He slyly undermines the superintendent’s intentional plagiarism by supplying him with already “plagiarized” materials, to act as messages to the educated woman the prison superintendent loves. He appropriates lines from Edgar Allen Poe, John Donne, and the Greek poet Sappho, but their words of love become “scriptive Morse tucked innocently into the lines of the poems” (33). [i] Janice later tells him that she recognized the SOS in the repetition of the line, “Save my soul, a prisoner,” that ran through his poems. The love poetry is turned to a new political and practical purpose. The literary symbol becomes actualized—he is an actual prisoner, not merely a metaphoric one.

The SOS refrain is one of Lomba’s more obvious literary devices, but his use of intertextuality within the poems themselves works both as a way for Lomba to snatch at lines of poetry that lie, like the stars and the rain, beyond the reach of the prison and as a sly indication of Muftau’s inability to write such poetry. Muftau’s blindness to the obvious allusions in the poems that Lomba intentionally plagiarizes points to his stupid deceit. However, the “plagiarism” of classic poems works not just to mock the prison superintendent but to say the things Lomba cannot directly communicate without being discovered. In Lomba’s “bowdlerization of Sappho’s ‘Ode’” (31) the superintendent does not see beyond the conventions of love poetry. He does not imagine that Lomba is writing anything but what he asked him to write: “‘A peer of goddesses she seems to me.’ Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?” (33). What the superintendent does not know is that in other translations of Sappho, the poet speaks of a rival who sits beside the beloved, hearing her laughter and her voice. The author of the poem stands at a distance from the couple, unable to reach the desired lady whose attention is turned to the rival, except through the poem. This reflects Lomba’s own position. Whereas J. Addington Symonds (as well as other translators) translates the poem so that the author addresses the beloved, indicating jealousy of the man who sits so close that he “…in silence hears thee/ Silverly speaking, /Laughing love's low laughter…” (Symonds 69), Lomba bowdlerizes the poem so that the seeming “author” of the poem is the man sitting “face to face” with her, who is entranced by “listening to the sweet tones of my voice, / And the loveliness of my laughing. /It is this that sets my heart fluttering / In my chest,” (Waiting 32). This beginning of the poem points ironically to the self absorption of the prison superintendent who imagines the tones of his choppy voice “sweet,” and his laughter “lovely,” just as he imagines his own poetry “great,” and that he is making Lomba “comfortable” in prison by giving him cigarettes (41). However, following this initial ironic hint, the poem transitions to another set of imagery, which points to the true author of the poem. As with the Sappho, the author of the poem is not the arrogant man who sits “face to face” with Janice, but the one who waits in agonies in the dark. The last nine lines of the poem, like the refrain of “Save my soul, a prisoner,” work to reflect Lomba’s true position as a prisoner:

I am no longer master of my voice,
And my tongue lies useless
And a delicate flame runs over my skin
No more do I see with my eyes;
The sweat pours down me
I am all seized with trembling
And I grow paler than the grass
My strength fails me
And I seem little short of dying. (32)

Here Lomba demonstrates the powerful potential of the love poetry Muftau thinks “harmless.” Using the conventions of love poetry in which the lover often seems helpless and in thrall to the beloved, Lomba reflects the literality of his own imprisonment. Read one way, the poem reflects the metaphoric imprisonment of the gaoler within the structures of his own conceit; in another way, the poem describes Lomba’s own experiences in prison. The two lines, “I am no longer master of my voice, /And my tongue lies useless” (32), reflect his observations in his diary that “[p]rison chains not so much your hands and feet as it does your voice” (14). The master of Lomba’s voice, indeed, is now the man who gives Janice the poem. “The delicate flame” (32) on his skin can also be read as the “acid, cancer” of anger “eating away your bowels in the dark” (15). And if the “lover” claims that “No more do I see with my eyes” (32) then no more can Lomba see in solitary confinement where after removing his blindfold, “the darkness remained the same” (24). As with any prisoner in a Lagos prison, “the sweat pours down me,” and if he is “seized with trembling” (32) it is like the inmate whose “hands shook, as if with a life of their own” (15) whose “strength fail[ed]” (32) him and who “collapsed into [Lomba’s] arms” (16) crying that “[i]f I go back there I’ll die” (15). The cry of the lover is the cry of the prisoner longing to be free.

If the love poem is powerful as a disguise for a more political reality, it is also powerful because it is a form that allows the imprisoned poet to reach out beyond his solitude to an audience that is both real and imagined. His imagination allows him not just to sneak his poems through the prison walls, but also to imagine liberation for himself. Lomba’s metaphoric “message[s] in a bottle, thrown without much hope into the sea” (39), recall the words of the marabout who had once predicted Lomba’s future in prison: “The water … takes away from us what we don’t need, and drops it at another shore where it is needed. Sometimes it returns to us what it took away, refined and augmented with brine and other sea minerals” (47). If read alongside the story in which Lomba’s poems are taken away from him by the prison superintendent and returned to him by Janice, the passage implies not just destiny but also agency. It is not that the superintendent merely “took” Lomba’s love poems from him, but that Lomba intended them as “messages.” His intended audience was not necessarily Janice but “myself, perhaps, written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” (38). Lomba’s use of the imagination is a defiant act of will: writing alone in prison, he imagines an audience for himself. The task of writing for the superintendent’s intended eventually gives him a corporeal presence to connect to his imagined audience. When the prison superintendent first tells Lomba that he gave Janice one of Lomba’s poems, Lomba imagines the superintendent’s rendezvous with her at a Chinese Restaurant. In his imagination Janice is reluctant to become involved with the man. He imagines that “[s]ometimes she is at loss what to make of his attentions. She sighs. She turns her plump face to the deep, blue lagoon. A white boat with dark stripes on its sides speeds past; a figure is crouched inside, almost invisible” (29). The poem “Three Words” that the superintendent later pulls out to give her is a poem Lomba had initially written before the raid that landed him in solitary confinement. The nearly invisible person crouched inside the boat that Janice saw earlier seems to become significant—the fleeting presence of the author of the poem, like that hidden almost invisible poet in the Sappho. That a seemingly futile poem meant only for himself had actually reached an audience indicates the power of Lomba’s imagination. When Lomba meets Janice, he finds that “my mental image of her was almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely” (36). It is as if his imagination has brought her to life, his SOS poems that he sent out into the world through the unlikely courier of the prison superintendent “written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe” had been found and brought back. He had dreamed his way out of the prison bars, and had reeled in one of the text’s many angels, who pulls his poems out of her purse and gives them back to him.



Endnotes:


[i] The first line of Edgar Allen Poe’s “To Helen” reads “Helen, thy beauty is to me” (Ferguson, Salter, and Stallworthy 879); Lomba writes “Janice, your beauty is to me” (Waiting 31). The first line and a half of Donne’s “The Good-Morrow” reads “I wonder by my troth, what thou and I /Did, till we loved?...” (Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy 263); Lomba writes “I wonder, my heart, what you and I / Did till we loved” (Waiting 31). The Sappho is reimagined from any one of many translations. The one I am using for comparative purposes here is J. Addington Symonds’ 1833 translation from Henry Thornton Wharton’s collection Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a literal translation (69).

Works Cited in Excerpt:

Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton, 2003.

Ferguson, Mary, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Ed. New York: Norton, 1996.

Symonds, J. Addington. “Blest as the immortal gods is he,” in Sappho: Memoir Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation by Henry Thornton Wharton. London: John Lane, 1908.