Ironed Blue Sky, 88° by Abeer Hoque ty-ga, ty-ga, bonning bright We have started to learn William Blake’s old ode to the tiger. We chant with enthusiasm, if not nuance. The heavy rhyme and meter drown any sense that might have accompanied the unfamiliar words. We are too concerned with getting the sounds in the right order to think about what the poem means. The University of Nigeria Primary School operates under an almost militaristic regime in its ample tree demarcated square in the middle of town. Even the classrooms, simple one floor structures arranged neatly in sets of three, resemble barracks. Mr. Eze runs Grade 6B with an iron fist and a cane made of the stiffest branch our class monitor, Obiora, can find in the brambles outside. No questions are allowed in our class: only answers or silence. We have three weeks to learn this poem: ten minutes at the end of each school day. Every few days, Mr. Eze will add a new verse to the right side of the blackboard in his perfect and precise penmanship. At the end of the three weeks, he will erase the poem from the board and we will recite it by heart in front of the entire primary school at Assembly. On the first day, we wait silently inside the classroom, while Mr. Eze fumes over his last cane, now broken and useless at his feet. Outside, Obiora is smoothing the branch he has broken off a tree and is walking slowly back to the classroom. When he enters, Mr. Eze walks swiftly and heavily over to the door and takes the cane out of his hands. Our monitor is good looking, tall for his age, taller than even most of the secondary school boys. This allows him a natural authority and that, coupled with respectable school marks, makes him an obvious choice for the coveted position of class monitor. He slips into his chair with an easy grace unusual for his size and age, and hunches over his worn wooden desk at the front of the first row near the door. I watch him surreptitiously from the back of the classroom. We start chanting again. and wot sholda and wot aht As half the class stumbles over the unfamiliar word “sinews,” Mr. Eze raises his new cane and snaps it down on Obiora’s desk. His bald head is shiny with sweat and droplets are forming above his forehead. “Silence!” he roars, “See-news, not sigh-news. How many times will we haf to do dis?” He starts down the aisle and asks each person in succession to pronounce the word. A slight deviation results in a sharp and painful rap on the back of a hand or an arm or back. Mr. Eze seems to be in a generous mood this time. We spent most of the last poem on our knees on the rough concrete floor with slowly rising welts on our backs, legs, and butts. Still, I pray for the break bell before he gets to the third row, and me. And within moments, I hear a deliberate clang. We pour out of the dark classroom into the light and space of the sprawling schoolyard. Twenty years after independence from Great Britain, our little English medium school in Southeastern Nigeria is still rooted in Anglophilia. Our open toed sandals may be one concession to the daily blazing heat, but we are required to don pristinely white socks under them. Within a few months, these socks will be indelibly stained with the red dust that covers everything. The blue and white checkered shirt that all the school girls wear is overlaid with a navy pinafore, styled with pleats. The boys wear also wear checkered shirts and formal shorts in the same thick navy fabric as our pinafores. This is the latest in English fashion, from decades ago, and completely unsuited for either of our two seasons, dry heat and wet heat....
If you liked this so far, Abeer Hoque lives in San Francisco. She was born in Nigeria to Bangladeshi parents and moved to the U.S. when she was 13. She recently completed her M.F.A. in writing at USF. This is her second appearance in print. E-mail: abeer@serve.com |