akabeksblogs: Forms from My sky

FORMS!

Eye sea the cloud walk the horizon

Of my imagination,

Day and Night

Eye sea men, women, animals, and birds

Forming in the sky,

Becoming evanescent to trace…

Eye watched and become the cloud,

Walking my canvas,

Creating my forms,

When I was a little boy just surviving with my siblings, and determined parents at Mr. Oshoko’s compound at Odenigbo, Nsukka, adjacent the Union Primary School; brand new and neat as at then, we had bucket toilets that served numerous tenants in the compound. Sometimes when my dad got angry and flogged me, I will dash to the kitchen, pick one beautiful spoon, drop it in the toilet and abscond or exile myself from the house as long as possible. It was a community toilet in a communal compound and any object you drop into it swims with maggots.

In those days, the nightsoil man came every night or one every two nights to evacuate bucket full of feaces. Whenever they had industrial dispute with their employers, they embarked on industrial action by refusing to evacuate the overfilled buckets of feaces. And whenever incidences like these happened, everybody heads to ugwu-awarawa ( a hill cut in two); it was said that the road construction company in the process of building the road, cut a hill in two to connect communities within that part of Nsukka town; Aro-uno, Onuiyi, Isiuja, Ibagwa, etc

Ugwu-awarawa route then had a mystery that surrounded it. Some claimed that unidentified dead bodies from accidents, and other causes were buried around the bushes near the road by local authorities; others claimed that the road was hunted; some even believed that kidnappers and head-hunters lock in the bushes around the road, and we are sternly warned not to venture there unaccompanied by adults. I remember a day at the primary school when every pupil was summon to the assembly ground by the school authorities, we were all told to vacate the school premises because a psychopathic killer was said to be headed towards the school via ugwu-awarawa. It was crazy that day at school, I had to rush home gabbing my younger sister and brother at both hands while my school bag hung on my neck. Looking back, I see all the stories then as a configuration of our collective imagination.

In those nights/ very early mornings, we went to ugwu-awarawa for natures call,

Kids were always accompanied by their parents or grown siblings since the road is always lonely at most time of the day and nights.

My father took my siblings and me on numerous trips to do our toilets there. On some nights that I went alone with my dad carrying the lantern to illuminate our path; this always came with less distraction unlike other times my siblings were in our company, I paid a lot of attention to the dark forms made by the trees lining the road against the sky. Sometimes, a very cloudy sky threatening to crash on us, the forms were incomprehensible to me as a kid.

The trees against the sky at night looked like those transformer figures in the movie threatening to grab one and vanish. The trees look like giant beings blocking the night skyline, as a little boy then, it was scary but, when I look back to those days. I realized how amazing the imagination played it games on a formative mind.

In my early years at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, I began to replay the forms in my minds sky; I set my imagination to work on recreating these forms on canvas. After I learnt the process of tie-dye, I began to imagine how dye will look like on canvas especially when the canvas is tied in a consistent pattern to create a kind of sky. In the first experiment I used oil paint to bring out and add effects to the forms on canvas after the batik. That was when I began to look imaginatively and closer to the forms in the sky. Most evening before twilight, I spent time gazing at the sky. Studying the evanescent forms, I see people rushing home after the day’s work, people at their home cooking with firewood and, people gathering in cliques discussing mutual topics. I see animals and birds of different kinds, and spirits monitoring all, and when I finally got a camera, I start to photograph images of the forms; it can be amazing what the camera captures during these outings.

I began to put a proper narrative to what I see and it came to me that acrylic paint will create a better finishing instead of oil paint. I also realized that a large canvas will serve better in creating the sky and the forms.

If you look at the sky between 5:00pm to twilight,

To total darkness,

Most times, you will see amazing forms, the cloud come together to create all

Kinds of forms which dissolves after some time just to create another form

In a continual evanescent ‘cloud art’

The beauty of the whole thing is that it freezes the scene in your memory; it is a

Performance art by an invisible being manipulating the cloud,

Today,

I wonder what people see when they look at the cloud in the sky,

I see what I saw as a little boy and more,

Though with a better understanding,

I see my childhood, the road to my adulthood, my neighbours and