For starters...

GATANANKU:
THE STORYTELLER’S DISPENSARY

“The stories people tell/ have a way/ of taking care of them” (Barry Lopez)
“Stories are not /just meant to make us smile; /our lives depend on them” (Chinua Achebe)

Hi, I’m the new Kid-on-the-Blog. I deal in words in all their various concoctions: Stories, Poems, Plays, Puzzles, and as more categories as get invented.
Here is your warranty on stuff from the Story Dispensary: if you do not go away with a take on life (and other such matters) any time you alight at my corner-kiosk on your cruise round Cyberspace that portends care for ay number of your cares, I’d have failed. You may blot me out from your Blogosphere.
Gatananku is the Storyteller’s opening salve in Hausa, the de facto lingua franca of West Africa (it’s also spoken as far as the Sudan and the Congo). As a formula, Gatananku is, arguably, more potent than its English equivalent – Once upon a time.
I’m Hausa by nurture. My Linnaean nomenclature in that regard is Mainasara Na’Mai-iko. More on that very important matter later on, I promise.
Gatananku is really a contraction (it seems to me we all have signed a contract with Language to contract it across tongues, where’er and when’er we may). The full Gatananku formula is:

Storyteller: Gatanan, gatanan ku - /
Audience: Ta zo mu ji ta!


This Storyteller’s opening gambit, literally, means: ‘She’s here! She’s here for you!’ /’Well she’s come – we’ll hear her tale!’ It presents Story as a woman – to capture the grace of the garb and the felicitous fecundity that the womb(man) so powerfully captures in a nutshell, so to speak.
This probably explains why the girl-child is far more highly prized by the Hausa then her male counterpart. She is it who gives all many a reason for mirth and madness, for the woman will always have a cause to celebrate or else remonstrate! And, as you probably know already, a woman sets pulses racing! Oh, what a bait! NOTE: To be handled with care.

As the old Wazir (vizier) in “Arabian Nights” posited to a – female – story apprentice,

“Sometimes, people need stories more than food [better prepared by you-know-who] to stay alive. Stories tell us how to live, and why.”


TAKE 1: The stories people tell become either nexuses – to connect them to further destinations and realities to relish in life. Or then excuses – keeping them from what they are capable of becoming in life. In arriving at the above catch to life, I have been influenced by the Hispanic-American, Barry L. Lopez (presumably no relation of a rather very well-known woman, Jennifer Lopez.

Get your free PDF copy of the essay teeming with insight on the theme: The Stories People Tell – Nexuses Or Excuses? Simply email: mainasara@gmail.com. I’ve got more stuff to dispense – not unlike one Asa Chandler of the Coca-Cola archetype that keeps giving and giving, century after century. You will do well to treat yourself to the care these stories have to give. Take!

I’ve baked a cake of a take on my country of primary domicile, Nigeria. She just tagged on a subplot to the unfolding story of her nationhood, with the recently concluded first slapdash of a civilian-to-civilian transfer of power from one government to another. To mark its momentousness, I am releasing to the reading public at large my monumental play-for-radio that attempts to dam the flash floods that carried away age-long political debris to make for a new butterfly order. To guard against fulfilling political philosopher George Santayana’s prophecy – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – the world must consider with us the signification of this uniquely African turning point: “CODENAME JUNE 12: MANDATE AND MAYHEM: The Greatest Threat to Nigeria’s Ruling Mafia and How It Was Checked.”

You may get a PDF copy of the Script FREE at www.lulu.com/ Then await the Audio Drama Production! It promises to be an aural experience of, well, the moment… Already, I have entered into talks with a Production Studio for its creation. Details later! A highly artistic form of the Drama, the Play for Radio (long regarded as the ‘theatre of the mind’) is truly most congruent with the fabric of life today, with its pervasive unobtrusive immediacy. It may well be the off-sight ‘edutainment’ medium of choice in the Mobile Age. No wonder, Internet Radio is now a big hit. CODENAME JUNE 12 will be available as a full downloadable real-audio file.

This Nigerian political watershed is now her true rallying-point. CODENAME JUNE 12 will help counter Voter apathy, voter intimidation and voter compromise, while fostering voter confidence for a robust enlightened electorate: Towards a saner polity across what I call ‘Democrasia’. Following Nigeria’s freest and truly representative Presidential Election of June 12, 1993, much water, indeed, passed under the Niger Bridge!

CODENAME JUNE 12 tells the entwined story of the quintessential Nigerian, Moshood MKO Abiola, and his romance with Nigeria. MKO transcended every cultural barrier – tribal, religious, economic, social, etc – placed on his path to blaze a new political trail. It was to be stillborn. The military junta – presided over by an orthodontically-challenged general, I. Badamasi Babangida – truncated it without any humanly comprehensible reason, something the Establishment was in dire short supply of.



O, THE YEARS

How the years have grown on me!
So like some tea.
Now, grim of mien,
All I do is lisp, ‘Do rien!*’

How the years have groaned on me!
Just now I teed
(My grip was mean!)
All I did was beam and lean.

How the years have groped for me!
Lost on some Sea,
Found it like Earth:
All to do is hog a heart.
© MAINASARA N., 2006
* French: meaning “It’s nothing!”


Article on the 40th anniversary of the life of "A Man of the People" was published on the ocassion in the press in Nigeria (THISDAY, MONITOR) and on the 'Net - to raise salient points, not to daze but to trace the intellectual impoverishment of a race and their place in the world:

African ‘talking books’: For the people, it’s sound to turn full cycle

It has been 40 deafeningly silent years since Heinemann Publishers first released Chinua Achebe’s very political novel on post-colonial Nigeria: A Man of the People. But then it aroused immense interest at its birth – because of its uncanny ending.

There, in black and white, was a prediction of the coup d’état set to rock the Nigerian polity only weeks later. The book had come out under that frontline publishing outfit’s African Writers Series, AWS, of which Chinua Achebe was Founding Editor.

I have often wondered if Nora Ephron didn’t speak truth after all to the ‘men of timber and caliber’ (apologies to the late Ozumba Mbadiwe), who were swallowed up in that precedent-setting political earthquake, when he said: "I always read the last page of a book first, so that IF I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out!" Had they but read – and taken to heart A Man of the People – it would have taken care of them! For we mustn’t ever forget that “the stories people tell have a way of taking care of them” (Barry Lopez).

But I’m jumping way ahead of my thesis. Back in secondary school when I first ‘did’ it – like I did books of every sort with my peers: oh yes – we did books! – I waved aside A Man of the People as ‘the hilarious Achebe.’ No doubt about it: the book still sets one rollicking in wave after wave of girth-racking mirth. There’s simply no let-up to the fun it packs!

Grown up (which isn’t always the same thing as aging), rereading it now sets alarms clanging in my head. What the Mahatma MK Gandhi said is really true: ‘Politics is too important to be left in the hands of politicians’! My thesis: To get things right, who better than the writer to take them up to pursue right to their logical end, for the benefit of all?

I think Achebe is uncanny, simply put. All right, it’s his writing that is. But recall his ‘Too Dangerous for Silence’ speech just before the crisis in his home state Anambra came to a full head? Now, that’s what I call uncanny! If only people would read, they’d be ready…

A Man of the People even has talk of why a headcount around here (another is due in late March) may turn out to be guesswork, and a calculated one at that! In a wry aside that has direct bearing on political permutations in the realm, the writer has the people’s thinking–represented by the narrator’s father–cast in the following microstory from this political odyssey:

…I know some foreigners think we are funny with figures. One day when I was in the university, an old District Officer with whom my father had worked long ago came to our house…[for] a call on his old interpreter. As they talked in the parlour my younger half-brothers and sisters kept up an endless procession in front of the strange visitor until he was constrained to ask my father how many children he had.
‘About fifteen,’ said my father.
‘About? Surely you must know.’
My father grinned and talked about other things. Of course he knew how many children he had but people don’t go counting their children as they do animals and yams. And the same I fear goes for our country’s population. [Pg. 111]

The political party in power in A Man of the People is ‘Peoples Organisational Party’, P.O.P. Now try ‘drawing out’ the difference between ‘O’ and ‘D’! Its main opponent (apposite, actually) is ‘Progressive Alliance Party’, P.A.P, described in the book as ‘weak and disorganised’. You know I know what that one is harbinger of! There’s yet a 3rd – a mélange of hotheaded eggheads to which the hero of A Man of the People is drawn: principally for vendetta over the loss of his girlfriend – to a minister in whose house he’d been an invited guest! This party is simply interested in securing a beachhead for times to come. But it seems its leadership can only speak from both sides of the mouth. Not so for our hero, who becomes indifferent with the whole scheme of things at the end.

Who then is ‘A Man of the People’? Is he the one who ‘performs’ in private for pockets? [Let the reader understand.] And further in bed for – or with; I do not have the details – people’s daughters-at-large, peers of his own daughters?

Now, just when will it be the turn of ‘the man for the people’, one who will truly PERFORM: especially to make power generation and distribution the norm in the land – and damn the bludgeoning generator sets and diesel-vending mafias ravaging the land? Personally, the noise-and-slick from that twosome is getting to me: Help, somebody!

Maybe that’s why I’m shouting and thrashing about to get this out. But I’m told the people like it so! So, people, I’m afraid the verdict is in: ‘A people get the leadership they deserve.’ Or is it: ‘A people deserve the leadership they get’? Nna, I suppose it’s all of the above bo.

Right now Nigeria stands at a crossroads, a make-or-mar socio-political transition. But maybe that’s too drastically hilarious a conclusion to reach…yet. But again, time will tell. It did in ’66.

My work of late is to help engender a culture of reading in the land. Believe me, it’s its own reward. And this reading culture must be, I always insist, principally of stories. ‘Stories,’ said Chinua Achebe, ‘are not just meant to make us smile [or, smirk]… Our life depends on them.’

According to art critic Kenneth Burke: ‘Stories are equipment for living’ – the spells that compel us to go on. These make up the infrastructure of our ‘belief system’ with which, says Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard – if it’s the right one – ‘we can predict the future.’ A Man of the People is right on cue here for predicting Nigeria’s future, I submit.

From my recent reading of the book, I’m now really desperate to get its story into the consciousness of the people it speaks so squarely to, to their Ego. For, according to Freudian psychology, this is the part of the mind with which we think and take action. From there it should percolate into the Id: the part of the mind that is completely unconscious but has hidden needs and desires. Desires for change…

I’m convinced the required solution lies in dramatizing the story professionally to yield an audio book. ‘Talking book’, I think, will be more telling a term for the African! Thus would the cycle be complete: Oral (its proto-state) to Written (its present form) to Aural (the projected format). See? On the archetypical ‘Israelite journey’ model – a national odyssey precipitated by crippling unbelief and dreadful nonchalance, much like ours – perhaps then there’ll be a ‘settling in’.

Big time publishers Random House has done it for even the most staid writing in their stable to bestseller writing, like Michael Crichton’s. And I’ve enjoyed quite a few Left Behind Series by Tyndale House in that format. The art has been ‘finished’ – no reservations as to ‘publishing sense’ whatsoever. I hope powers that be here get the point enough to act on it!

People are naturally curious. If they like the ‘talking book’, they’ll want to see it in print as well. Much like people go all out to secure the lyrics to songs they’re taken with, which they then refer to over and over again. At least until the next rave release!

Having proposed a toast to A Man of the People on its 40th, the other aspect of my present work is to move for its induction into the Channels Outstanding Books – COB – List. I hope you will come to agree with me that the story is both succulent and serious enough to sink ones mental teeth into again and again. As for what’s in it for the writer, I’ll advise that his literary agent begin pursuing a deal with publishing houses with a history of making a success of audio books – in time for the author’s 76th birthday come November 19th.

‘Faith comes by hearing’, states the Good Book (the same way fear makes its entrance into the human heart, mind you). Karlgaard writes: ‘Beliefs have consequences, which are sometimes harsh’ – but there are some others that are enabling. The people can be made conscious of what’s really up (for grabs?) when any zealous lot shows up, panting to romp with their polity, claiming to have elixirs for her teething and other growing up pains, etc, etc.

With George Santayana clanging in their ear – ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ – the people will then wag this book in the face of the political lot to say, Caveat actor: ‘Let the doer beware.’ For, now: We are aware!

Meantime, 3 happy cheers to A Man of the People at 40, when a new life will begin!

SMS or email your endorsements or reservations on A Man of the People for its inclusion on the COB List.
(Indicate Name, Location & Gender)
GSM: +234(0) 8023920443
Email: mainasara@gmail.com

‘Deleke Adeyemi Host of The Book Club on Channels TV will be doing an appreciation of A Man of the People on-air during March.

Come & Load Up!
BOOKATERIA®tv Chef: ‘Deleke
Reading maketh a FULL man… – Sir Francis Bacon