Dr. Tess Onwueme wins the Fonlon Nichols prize for contributions to World Literature and Drama. (www.tessosonwueme.com)

TESS ONWUEME' S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR THE FONLON- NICHOLS PRIZE IN LITERATURE.


FOLON NICHOLS AWARD ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: FINAL DRAFT

Delivered by Professor Tess Onwueme on April 17, 2009 (6-8pm)
At the 35th ALA Conference, sponsored by the University of
Vermont, at the Sheraton Hotel, Burlington, Vermont, April 15-19, 2009.
(www.tessosonwueme.com)


ACCEPTANCE SPEECH: FOLON NICHOLS AWARD




My people, I hear you! Yes! So much so that your loud acclamation now prompts me to make this confession. As a good student of Prospero’s Caliban, let me simply say that I’m flabberwhelmed. And overghasted! Can’t you see I’ve turned radio-active. Going beyond hot flashes to having power surges? And I have you all to blame for this, this my blazing joy of transformation. Your eloquent nods inspire me now to walk on water. I salute you! Especially those who conspired to arraign me here to be acknowledged and honored by this Distinguished body of scholars and writers. And you know, what? To you, you enablers, making me fly so high now and soar above, I’ll put you on notice in the manner of the Big Brother Idi Amin, “I shall retaliate! You hear me? I will retaliate!” But for now like the true daughter of Africa, Nigeria and the Anioma Igbo world that I am, I rouse you to affirm with one voice: Kwenu! Kwenu! Kwenu!

And yes, I hear you…Calling me to Duty. So here I stand. I accept! I accept your offer of the Fonlon Nichols Award. I accept this grand honor simply not as an insignia of my own valorization in stepping to the steep height or pinnacle in the roll call of literary Divas or giants, but as my own special call to duty. My mandate to rise up and be counted in the ranks of veteran vanguards of Truth and Justice, exemplified by––Bernard Nsokika Fonlon and Lee Nichols—these men of steel whose uncompromising spirits in the face of wrong, with them speaking Truth to Power, both inspire and inform this award as an enduring legacy to us.

In receiving this cherished award, therefore, I’m mindful of this one fact: That I’m not alone anymore. For I am acutely aware that I stand on the broad shoulders of literary giants and truth seekers—like the irrepressible brother, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sister Nawal el Sadaawi, respectively interrogating, digging ever deep into the murky, toxic rubbles of our world, still reeking with the raped, decomposing, mutilated and battered body of Africa—and her women in particular--to exhume the buried and distorted body of Truth and Justice in the swift boats of today’s techno-crazy world.

On this subject I’m reminded of a car sticker I once read with the apt inscription:
“If you want Justice, You must work for Truth.” Are we, really?

And wasn’t it that indefatigable sister Sadaawi who gave us her luminous insight on the subject when she noted that: “Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies?”

With your blazing barge of honor, you, this distinguished body have branded and marked me worthy to mount the treasured heights reserved for those elders brimming with knowledge, authority and power. You have armed me. Yes! To breathe with my fingers. To Speak with my pen. To Drum with my pen, knowing that words are coals on fire.

Indeed to my mind, To Speak Is To Risk Being Heard; And/Or Charged.

And simply put: In Writing I aim to kill Silence!

For anchor here, I’d like to invoke that Swedish man of letters––Per Watsberg––in his assertion that “words are instruments of power (Watsberg, 2005).”

Now that you’ve hired me to follow the footsteps of Fonlon and Nichols in their irrevocable advocacy for the rights of the many who have no power, no place, and no voice to claim/assert their dignity and identity lost, stolen, or denied, I accept your job offer to serve the role of Solicitor and Advocate for the oppressed. Because I, too, in my own limited creative cocoon, have been undergoing the requisite audition for this challenging job description that you’ve assigned me.

And it is not without costs. Indeed, I see the tantalizing tight strings attached. I see them, and sigh deeply to fill up my wheezing/limping lungs for the bigger journeys ahead. With your call, your thousand and one ears tuned, sifting through and weighing every word I utter or write, along with those myriad eyes riveted and beaming on me now, I feel the spotlights, prodding me onto the feverish world-stage. So where now can I hide? Where?

When I stand now in the marketplace of ideas, sensing my glowing anxieties, with much trepidation, I see me armed with smoldering coals in my palm, empowered by you. And you expect me to play and act with caution now, when you’ve tattoed me with the scorching torch of truth and justice brandished by Folon–Nichols? Haba! How can you put sizzling coal fire in the hand of a child, and urge her to carry it with care? You see? See me now caught in the crossroads. In relishing this new-found flora and aura of power, I must confess that I feel stripped of my long cherished cloak of privacy and innocence as your probing eyes have branded me with the odd mix of flickering fear, and pride and daunting affirmation of this given cause that I must champion?

Like a naked Diva, I sense my own vulnerabilities now from this sudden emergence in the glare of your searing light, at once projecting and imposing their own new responsibilities.

And am I ready now? Yes! Because you’ve charged and armed me with your flaming torch of honor and knowledge, I know now that I’m on the right course, and therefore, must persist in Writing and Staging the Invisible in my work.

Indeed for over two decades, within the lonely acts and scenes of my creativity, I’ve since made it my business to Write and Stage the Invisible in my creative work as a viable channel/forum to give them a voice—and STAGE A HEARING FOR THEM.

And just Who or What constitutes the Invisible in our world—our African world especially? For this I take umbrage in the sizzling insights of the Japanese American writer, Hiyase Yamamoto who insists that:
“Invisibility is an Unnatural Disease.”

Invisibility, an unnatural disease? In what way(s)? Just how many such ‘unnatural diseases’ and disasters are plaguing our world today––especially Africa…our Africa? Many. Myriads, I’d say. For the Invisible are those Voiceless, Powerless, Disillusioned, Dis-empowered, Socio-Economically and Culturally Displaced, Dislocated, Dehumanized, deracinated, and indeed—Dissed—or Dumped.

The Invisible are those identified and tagged by our own Ngugi as the 80%/majority who live below “the breadline standard.” The Invisible are those groveling in poverty, and wallowing in the margins of power and privilege, pushing them beyond dysfunctional into desperate acts of survival.

For these Invisible trapped in theescalating, choking cancerous fumes and furnaces of today’s globalization, urbanization, corruption, hunger, socio-economic, cultural and political drought that kills and pollutes the polity with the Land/Environment. Of the massive unnatural diseases and disasters killing and maiming so many, Poverty leads the pack, reigns supreme, for it not only holds a “Permanent Residence” in Africa with cousins in other Third Worlds, but brazenly wields its unruly unchallenged power as alternate generic “Weapons of Mass Destruction” or WMD, for short.

Or, isn’t that the monster we invented a name for since 911?
Are these destructive forces-- tagged as Weapons of Mass Destruction ––or WMD––Thanks to the then American reigning “DECIDER” and emperor, ever-ready to wound and silence any voice of dissent with swift “pre-emptive strikes.”

Why then is it politically incorrect in our world with such growing inequities and disparities to wage counter-insurgency acts targeted at liquidating the menace of crippling poverty with its mounting fatalities, ---quite ironically--in the midst of affluence?

Can’t you see the aggressive and metastasized cancer of AFFLUENZA terrorizing many--especially now, now, in these turbulent times and states of massive unemployment, hunger, starvation, with their deadly cousins of corruption and injustice?

Is Poverty a WMD? Could it be? And why not? Well, my people, help me to ponder this question that’s been dwelling in my work with its undying mutations and metamorphosis since the late seventies. In play after play-- from The Desert Encroaches, through Ban Empty Barn and Other Plays, Cattle Egret Versus Namma, Then She Said it, and What Mama Said, to name a few—I have been marinating this question, by writing and staging the invisible as my chosen subjects, by creating a viable public space for them to vent, and thus give them the much-needed voice by “staging a hearing for them.”

Can’t you hear the sighs and screams beneath their silence?

In these contentious arenas, can’t you see and hear me sifting through the chaotic rubble of noisy modernity in today’s globalization, with its victimizing, deforming, mis-informing and transforming malignant toxic impact on so many powerless, voiceless, marginalized, confined or crushed in the stampede for power and capital--to help me discover, frame the experiences and concerns of those left behind the gateways of power and privilege?

Can’t you hear them…the unemployed and jobless, marginalized and impoverished and despairing and deracinated, deformed and dissed…with the greedy few amassing and cuddling the wealth of the Earth just to themselves and leaving the majority burdened and sore from the pain of neglect?

These reckless ruthless powers choke and prey not only on the people but also on the Land—our Environment. In broad daylight these brazen powerful interests still rape our Mother/land? Siphon her. Drain her. Suck her dry. And left gasping from the glut of our oil in their gloating gut? And just as the Niger and Benue rivers, with their estuaries, empty into Oceana, the Atlantic Sea as depicted in the allegorical What Mama Said and Then She Said it?

Come. Let me take you on a brief excursion of my own creative writing to show you now. Come. See flashes of the Invisible—humans, like damaged goods, littered in the landscapes of my drama. Come. See the dumped and ‘dissed’ Invisible that the indomitable Franz Fanon dubbed The Wretched of the Earth in both their local and global (con)texts in their daily struggles for clean water and clean air and food and identity and dignity in the toxic choking edges or bottoms of the blistering capitalist “Market Culture” of our world today, as labeled by Cornel West.

In my work, I’ve also repeatedly raised such dust to project, not just the dis-membered body and soul of Africa with her far-flung and estranged Diaspora since the black history’s hemorrhage with the Middle Passage, respectively re-membered/recreated in Riot in Heaven and The Missing Face?

Can’t you hear the sighs and screams beneath their Silence? And what are the implications of silence? According to an authoritative source, “Silence goes beyond the absence of sound. For socially, it is a sign of the overbearing memories that burden us…”

And you wonder about the topographies of silence in my work? I’ll show you the undulating and unfolding landscapes of the silence of the Invisible framed in my work.

Of the many Culture Shocks I’ve had since coming to America, one that still stands out is the reference or naming of the Land/Earth as “Dirt” in American popular parlance. How could the Earth/Mother/Land be simply Dirt? Any wonder then why they rape her–as they did Africa, tearing her apart in their (in)famous scramble for Africa with the partition, as they treat her like Dirt, then Dump her as Dirt, their own waste product? In daylight robberies, they batter, trade, Auction, soil, siphon the belly of our Land, our world--just as the traditional Chief, Ethiope in the unholy alliance with Atlantic, the Multinational Oil Director, and Kainji, the Government Official, all joined at the hip, for their own self-interest to maximize the accumulation of Capital as dramatized in my play Then She Said it.
--Two decades ago—precisely in 1985—I signaled the first stage of this menacing Environmental threat in my dramatic publication of the Desert Encroaches.

And what about the Nuclear waste? How do we classify it?
As healthy food and nourishment for the sizzling Land? And for us? Where is their dumping ground today?

Just recently, on February 18th/19th, 2009 The UK Independent world, and the Nigerian This Day newspaper respectively raised a new alarm with the caption: “UK Toxic Waste Dumped in Nigeria and Ghana.”

But who am I to speak for her, this raped motherland? For when the Earth speaks with fury, talking back to us as she does these days with her sudden eruptions—through tsunami, volcanic, hurricane, and related eruptions, she leaves no one second-guessing her. Yes!! She frosts, yawns, swells, rolls, or roars to say aloud that she cannot take it anymore. Yes, the tired mother groaning with the bruised and torn vulva of the land doesn’t talk; she yells. So who am I to speak for the abused Mother/land?

But as a conscious daughter of the combustible flaming Niger-Delta---with the natural gas flaring for so many decades now, with the heart, body, and soul of the rural communities in the battered and plundered Land burning 24/7, and with none with needed voice to say ENOUGH!!—yes! what then should my role be, but to reaffirm her, openly shout her pain, this Mother/land, turned MURDER-LAND?

Since I have no such political power to stop the carnage, I’ll just latch on to this one space, this one crucial forum that I can control, to speak, to protest, to rebel, to scream, to save, to heal, to resurrect whomever I can—in my drama? Can’t you see? That:


1. The Environment is not merely the physical space we own or appropriate by imperial force or will or coercion euphemized as Colonialism. No!

2. That Our Environment reflects and embodies the land, our Land. With our soul and body rooted in that Land. Like the invisible umbilical cord linking and securing us to the very root of our being and essence, our Land/Environment is us. It embodies what we eat. What we breathe. What we have or don’t have because some, the avaricious few, appropriate it to themselves at the expense of many others.

And simply stated:

Who profanes our land, profanes us. Who steals our land, steals us—body and soul. Who pollutes our land, pollutes us––in their myriad mutations of: corruption, avarice, cultural, political, economic injustices added to the plagues of social class with patriarchal customs and traditions privileging some against others—like those imposed on women’s liberty and identity in Africa and related societies.

And so I have this for your Take Out or Take Away as that sums up our “Market Culture” of today.

***One thing is certain: we cannot mass produce this Land, our Earth. But we, can of course, mass-produce Nike Shoes in those seething China and related sweat shops—with many being held in economic hostage—Yes, we can mass produce Calvin Klein Jeans and shirts and Automobiles, build skyscrapers on land, and maybe even clone the likes of us, animals? But the Land, our Land? I think not. Of course the powerful can expand and claim Land that they do not own through genocide against the American Indian, the African, Iraqi and any other they feel powerful enough to subdue. But no matter what, Land is one solid gift from nature that we cannot reproduce. No matter the scientific feats we brag about, Land is a fixed Quantity; a Limited entity. We just cannot clone Land. Period!

Isn’t that cause for us to care and take caution to save and cherish it thus? Well…think...So how are we working for peace and justice? How? With the deluge of inequities in our world. With some eating taking more than their fair share and being so bloated in their loot as the oil and natural resources glut in their greedy gut? With this how can and will the Land, our Environment be whole? How can the bleeding (Mother)Land heal from the perennial plagues in both our local and global communities today? Think. Just Think about it for the health of our Land, our Environment.

And finally we turn now to other salient dimensions of my dramatic vision.

Come. I’ll show you the emaciated lean and hungry starving or mangled bodies of the Invisible with the muffled voices moaning or throbbing through the landscapes of my drama.

See them. Hear them--the impoverished mothers like Omesiete (in my play Shakara Dance-Hall Queen, 2001; 2006), Niger, Benue (in my Then She Said It, 2003), Sherifat, Yemoja (in my Tell it to Women, 1995; 1997),

Come. Feel the livid pulse of the cynical and despairing, disgruntled, disillusioned, unemployed youth–like Oshun, Koko, Obida (in Then She Said it), Shakara and Dupe (in the play of that eponymous title, SHAKARA)--all pushed to the edge and ready to market their nubile bodies as commodities sold to the highest bidder, along with
their unemployed jobless able-bodied and hollow colleagues––like Faith, Justice, Freedom and Equity (in No Vacancy);

Come. See their tired mothers, too, scratching the bare earth to feed and survive in their land––ironically the same land that is richly endowed, flowing with oil and natural gas resources––but where they’re sapped and sucked dry by the rich powerful transnational forces__like Oceana, Atlantic, allied with the decadent local corrupt leaders and elites like Ethiope, Kainji, Madam Kofo (in Shakara), and
determined to keep the underclass exploited, oppressed, silenced, violated, just like their land, siphoned by the powerful interests depicted in What Mama Said and Then She Said it, and Shakara: Dane-Hall Queen, or like Jefferson Lugard and Stanley Livingstone in Riot In Heaven.

And What about the impoverished powerless ants, termites, lambs, the goats, the pigs, the down-trodden citizens of the allegorical Why the Elephant has No Butt, who are trapped and suffocating from the (geo)poly-tricks of wealth and power by the rival mighty powers of the Elephants, the Lions, the Bears, the Hyenas and their ilk in a variety of (con)texts: The Desert Encroaches, Then She said It, what Mama Said, and Why the Elephant Has No Butt.

I know them. Hence I write them. Frame their lean, lined, and contoured faces of the ‘dissed’ Invisible that I stage in my work.

I know the tenor, color and character of their pain. For I hear it.
I hear the groans, shouts, and screams beneath their silences. It is the color and character of their screams that I dramatize/represent in say, Omesiete, Shakara, the underclass youth restless to wrest her sordid life from the gripping jaws of poverty. Failing, she yields her own body to the vampires of the marketplace.

So think. Is hunger or starvation by the impoverished masses not an urgent moral failure and socio-economic crisis for our leadership?

If mass hunger or poverty isn’t a WMD, then tell me what is. If silence imposed on many in the face of persistent wrong isn’t classified as mass Torture or masked WMD, then tell me what is. Or is there a Statute of Limitation on what should or shouldn’t be regarded as WMD? If so who determines it? Just the “DECIDERS”?

So WHY CAN’T WE CLASSIFY HUNGER & POVERTY AS WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, WMD with so many stifled by it in Africa, Haiti, India, Indonesia, etc today? Which WMD is a bigger threat to us in the septic metropolis of Africa, Haiti, the “slumdunks” of Mumbai, West and South-South Chicago, Newark, the Watts of LA, Brixton in London, Ajegunle, Mushin, Maroko of Lagos, Nigeria, with the festering Favellas trimming the glittering inner belly of the luxuriant tourist attractions of Ipanema, Copa-Cabana of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and elsewhere?

In short, can we expand the notions of Human Rights, Freedom, and Justice to include the pandemic of hunger—these pandemic lacks-- lack of water and power, lack of good roads, lack of jobs, lack of essential commodities, lack of money, lack of hospitals, and when they’re there, lack of drugs, and oh, the interminable abyss of the lack and lacking, and even where there are only their corpses or carcasses of the visible monuments exist as most stare blankly at the dying patients who need drugs that are either beyond their reach, or have simply disappeared into the loaded and bloated pockets and Swiss accounts of the privileged few .

And if the massive corruption that kills merit to benefit the privileged and opportunistic few at the expense of the majority is not an equally insidious threat, indeed, a WMD against the health of the body and soul of the (mother)land, then tell me what is?

So my people, you can see now where I’m coming from? Yes! I need answers to questions that remain unanswered. And that is Why I Write To kill Silence. Yes!! I write to prick you here and beyond to help me find the answers these questions that choke and burn my gut. Period!

And to prove it, you’d let me share brief excerpts from two my plays, THEN SHE SAID IT, and SHAKARA DANCE-HALL QUEEN. WILL YOU? (www.tessosonwueme.com)