writing – The Human Rights Warrior

“I wrote a poem about you today,” I said. “Well, just a haiku. But actually, I wrote two.”

This caught my 8 year-old daughter’s attention. She put down her Monster High doll, the one she just bought with money hard-earned from chores like scooping the cat’s litterbox.

“What’s a haiku?” she asked. Apparently, they hadn’t yet covered this in her third grade class.

“It’s a kind of short Japanese poem. It has three lines, with a total of only seventeen syllables. The first line is five syllables, the second is seven and the third is five.”

As she read my haikus, I said, “I wrote about you, but usually haikus are about nature.”

“Like about animals?”

“Sure. ‘Animals’ is three syllables, so you need two more for the first line. Then seven, then five.”

“Syllables, like beats in music?”

“Exactly.”

She didn’t even pause to think. She launched right in.

“Animals live in …”

“You’re doing it! You’re writing your very own haiku! Now seven syllables. Where do animals live?”

“Jungle, forest and…” She counted out the syllables on the five fingers of her right hand. Then two more on the fingers of her left hand. She had painted her fingernails in an alternating pattern with red and blue nail polish. Red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, red blue.

“City? Ocean?”

“That’s great! Which one? Ocean or city?”

“Nature everywhere.”

“You did it! You wrote your own haiku!”

She smiled – a small, proud smile – and then she picked up her doll again.

“That was really good. Let me write it down. Can you say it again?”

She shrugged, engrossed in brushing the doll’s hair.

“I forgot it already,” she said.

“But I’m your mom and I will always remember,” I thought.

Haiku by Eliza

Animals live in

Jungle, forest and city. (or ocean)

Nature around us!

This post, Haikus With My Daughter , Thanksgiving and Haikus With My Daughter III: Girls Rights are in response to the WordPress Weekly Writing Challenge.

Photo by my colleague Rosalyn Park, taken during our trip to Sierra Leone in 2004

Nelson Mandela read Chinua Achebe when he was in prison and reportedly described him as a writer “in whose company the prison walls fell down.” I read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in college, three decades after it was written, required reading on a syllabus that only included one African author. I read his other books later, as well as some of his essays. The obituaries describe him as an African Literary Titan and a “towering man of letters”. True words, but he was more than that. Much has and will be written about Chinua Achebe as the writer that wrested writing about Africa – that vast and varied Africa, as if one writer could ever represent it – back from the West.

There is one poem by Chinua Achebe that has stayed with me for many years, not because it captures the global themes of colonialism or tradition v. Western values, but because it captures so perfectly the small moments of heartbreak and love that I myself have seen in the refugee camps I have visited in Sierra Leone and Ghana. That Chinua Achebe could capture the small moments of human connection along with the global themes was a mark of his genius. Upon reading the news of Chinua Achebe’s passing today, I read A Mother In A Refugee Camp again. I share it now, my own way of saying thank you, “like putting flowers on a tiny grave”.

A Mother In A Refugee Camp

No Madonna and Child could touch
Her tenderness for a son
She soon would have to forget. . . .
The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea,
Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs
And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps
Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there
Had long ceased to care, but not this one:
She held a ghost-smile between her teeth,
And in her eyes the memory
Of a mother’s pride. . . . She had bathed him
And rubbed him down with bare palms.
She took from their bundle of possessions
A broken comb and combed
The rust-colored hair left on his skull
And then—humming in her eyes—began carefully to part it.
In their former life this was perhaps
A little daily act of no consequence
Before his breakfast and school; now she did it
Like putting flowers on a tiny grave.

—Chinua Achebe

16 November 1930 – 22 March 2013

Share this:

Like this:

A Mother In A Refugee Camp

Share this:

Like this: