All stand – even like a strip-teaser
Without breast or hair!
Two figures,
Fugitive from light, go kicking
Their shadows down steps belching up
The comer. Just then, as if in affectionate
Recognition, a wake of wrappings,
Fingers have fondled, tongues
Have sucked to stumps, blow
Them kisses with the gum-wetness
Of a wind limping also to bed.
And I am
As the bum washed up on
The street, where markets are full
To fiesta, lesser by far than the scarecrow
Left over a farm, long after
Elephant trumpet and
chorus of locust.
So acute grew the emptiness in me during my last days of shunting between Princeton and New York, while there appeared a flooding everywhere, that the final offerings Princeton had for my kind even swept me back to that place. It was like a dog returning to its place of vomit, more so as I had no stomach really for the fare. This was a fourfold feeling. First there was a farewell dinner given to the Colonel and other close faculty members by the Parvin Fellows, minus the Yugoslavian, who refused to do anything which would deplete his funds any more. The one thing I recall of it is Barbara, the Colonel’s wife, trying frantically to draw my attention to the fact without actually telling me directly that only that day, very memorable everywhere for the use of police dogs, electric cattle prods, and high-pressured firehoses on young men and women Negro demonstrators down South, those of them so ‘liberal’ in Princeton had gathered together and wired a righteously indignant message to President Kennedy in Washington to please do something to save the good name of the United States.
Another dinner, an official return affair for the group, was graced by Mr Albert Parvin himself. Flying in all the way from California, there was our benefactor in real flesh and blood, no longer some remote ghost donor like those foundations and trusts but remaining for us an unshakable legend. An American of straight Armenian stock, he moved in a sprightly way among us in his silk suit in Princeton’s famous Lowrie House, and he was full of high hopes that each of us there was at last well prepared, certified and properly diplomaed to return home and spread the good American word abroad.
In between times, the Colonel took the group out sight-seeing in New York City. In the course of it we watched the Stock Exchange in action, a real market of an affair except that it was all men and no women and wares, and we also, as the highlight of the day made the ascension of the Empire State Building, the most impressive address in all America, as the ad runs. Sandwiched between those engagements was a lunch date we had at Princeton House with a Vice-President of the Esso cartel, a proud Princetonian. Answering hushed queries as we ate, he summarily dismissed all talks about the existence of monopolies and of their ever ganging up against governments of countries in which they operate. Rather, he preferred to dwell on the huge benefits and blessings that accrue to the natives from Persia to Peru in the form of house projects and other such vital amenities that they could never have had were things left in the ineffectual, grabbing hands of their puppet dictators. And returning to home grounds, he spoke of how corporations like his are really the trust of the people, operating only and solely in the interest and welfare of the general public. Listening to him, I had some idea of how a famous Senator, now dead, must have sounded atop Capitol Hill as he grandly declared that there could never be any conflict of interest in his promoting in Congress the cause of an oil holding of which he happened to be the proud possessor.
My other final engagement was with an old friend and expert from the State Department in Washington. I think he too was an old Princetonian, although his mission that day had a more serious purpose than just social. It was to ascertain from participants themselves whether or not they had found the Parvin programme a useful experience. And to this end he fed me at my interview with him with questions like these: So did I think an examination at the end of the course would be the one way of finding out who had gained from it? But that wouldn’t be fair, would it, with members of a group as different in background and outlook as are your General and that young prisons chap from your own country? And there is the difficulty of language, as with the man from South Korea. But isn’t the real difficulty the fact that Princeton has not all the faculties to meet the needs of a group like this? For example, it has no School of Journalism like Columbia, not that those of you who are journalists, a majority in the group, really need any other training. But the agriculturist in the group has had to go to Rutgers, away in New Brunswick hasn’t he? And coming to you personally, do you put politics to use in the course of your creative writing? I never felt so prompted in all my life.
One last concrete thing I clutched at was the idea of paying my way on that very round-trip tour of the United States that the Colonel and his governing colleagues at Princeton were so determined on denying me. This the Greyhound Bus people assured and guaranteed me for a ticket as low as $99. So out I whipped those Esso sectional maps of America already packed away in the heavy luggage I had long made secure for its sea voyage home. With help and advice from friends, in place of the Colonel, retired now for ever as far as I was concerned, I mapped a route down South through Washington to Houston in Texas and New Orleans in the brothers Long’s Louisiana; on from there (if I was still alive and sound of limb after the colour barriers and bombs of places like Birmingham!) past the deserts and sprawls of New Mexico, and Arizona to the Grand Canyons of Colorado, sheer as the Niagara Falls that I had already seen, and so to Chicago on the Great Lakes, striking West from there on the Golden Route to California and the Orient beyond.
From each of these places I made up my mind I would send affectionate postcards to the Colonel and his wife. That, someone said, should be real cute, although he wondered if the recipients would not consider it so cheeky that they might continue with their apparent pursuit of me out of the United States. But tempting as the whole prospect undoubtedly was, I told myself it was after all not really worth the trouble. New York and Washington DC formed for me the great lounge and hall of the American mansion with Princeton as the holy recess and study. After being received and fêted and then eventually shown the door, it would be superfluous of me, if not exactly prowling and loitering, to insist on seeing the walks and gardens that owners of the house call places like California, the kitchen and incinerator that are spots like Chicago and Pittsburgh, and the water-closet and cellars that go by the name of the Deep South. So why not return home, which is where no one rejects you, and perhaps make a few stopovers in England and Europe, instead of using up time and money, which was running out anyway, in hanging around hosts now turned hostile?
And so it was one Wednesday night in May I found myself on the midnight flight from New York’s Idlewild Airport (as it was then) to London.
‘Oh, do come back soon, JP!’ Ruth and Sam, Cat and Israel, real Americans who had taken me in and would not let me go, all called out to me. But I was past the Customs barrier now, and all I could mumble back was: ‘Yes, I do hope so!’
About the Author
J. P. CLARK was a poet, playwright, and professor born in Kiagbodo, Nigeria in 1935.
He was educated at the University of Ibadan and taught until 1980 at the University of Lagos where he co-edited the magazine Black Orpheus, the first African literary journal written in English. Clark also produced translations and travelogues such as America, Their America (1964), written after his time spent studying at Princeton University. The book propelled his international reputation but also resulted in controversy in the US for its criticism of American society.
In 1991, he received the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award for literary excellence and was awarded a Doctor of Letters by the University of Lagos. Clark died in 2020.
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