kankana
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 14/Aug/2010 19:20, 34 days ago
There’s a gorgeous sense of powerlessness and desolation when Anglo-Saxons write about the elements.  In‘Andreas’, which I can’t stop raving about at the moment, the poet sort of forces in a bit of storm so he can chuck out some of what are clearly his pet phrases and images with some exuberant syntactical variation:wedercandel swearc, he says– the candle of the sky became black –windas weoxon, wægas grundon, streamas styredon, strengas gurron, wædo gewætte.  You can hear and feel it without any translation– it’s the gathering storm, with wind and sea and current mounting in ferocity, and then the very elements of the ship (strengasandwædo) rising to join them, surrounding the men with their unnatural, clanging, dissonant power.  Beautifully, then, the poet sayswæteregsa stod:‘the water-terror arose’.  I love that‘egsa’ as a suffix – highly useable in everyday life and charmingly vague – is the fear only because the men are a bit scaredy, or is it intrinsic to the water itself, expressing something of the sea’s power?And so it has been this evening– indeed, several evenings past – in Kaduna.  I’m sure there’re plenty of people in Britain who don’t think of rivers bursting their banks and lowering clouds as exciting new elements of a world burgeoning with interest and new life.  But that’s what VSO is all about, I think: rediscovering what in life is exciting, and what’s actually important.  (Generally so far, for the former the answer is‘most things’, and the latter ‘not an awful lot, actually’.)  And so sitting in a bar as a beautiful, rainbow-cladevening becomes an entirely black firmament pebble-dashed with lightning and the wind begins to rise is quite merry, actually.  Even when– thanks to recent events – this all means that you have to leave your beers undrunk, sweep your food into the plastic bag from whence it came, and run home around puddles that clearly intend to form a hegemony where the road used to be.  Even when, on arriving home, rain is sweeping into your home through an open window and the only practical solution, to keep as much dry as possible, is to go outside in your pants and a headtorch and hold it closed while your wife attempts fruitlessly to lock it.  I have no doubt that this last will form the basis of an erotic film at some point, because I certainly looked attractive when I returned from the mossy mud in which our home is (hopefully) firmly based.It’s wet here. Really, really wet.  (It’s notPakistan, though.)  This afternoon, the Nigerian Red Cross and Presidential Emergency Response Team came out to have a look (as did most of theachabadrivers in Kaduna, who seemed mightily amused by me taking photos of the chaos).  The river, onestreet away from us, has risen– at a guess – two metres in the four weeks we’ve been living here, mostly in the last week.  As the major river in the north of Nigeria, there’s a considerable lag time between the sky heaving itself at us and the water level menacing our heels – but it surely comes.  That’s why the road next to us now appears as this photo attests.  That’s before the rain this evening – and before the rain tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that…  The water is patient, and it is rising.Interestingly, everyone from the landlord to a chap on the street who saw me looking nervy is absolutely confident that we won’t flood.  These are the same people who thought it wouldn’t flood at all because it only floods every three years, and last year was bad.  A little further probing, though, reveals that actually there were no floods until about 15 years ago, and since then it’s flooded about every three or four years – apart from the last few years, when it’s pretty much burst its banks every couple of years.  Now, I’m no expert on water and drainage (and I can’t wait to hear your expert opinions, Pete: I expect diagrams and a bridge design) but it seems to me that, if you have a river that’s the major drain for most of the population of about a third of a country.  And then that population grows exponentially for years and years.  And you don’t change your drainage system.  Then that river will probably not follow some kind of bizarrely regular natural pattern of flooding, but flood in response to how much water gets into it, and how quickly that water arrives there.  More people surely equals more water in the manmade system, more quickly.  Which may or may not mean that we’re screwed.For now, I await the water with joy– my only –egsais that of tedium so the coming days should be good ones…