In Forums Like These

To Cheriyan Alexander

You probably don't remember me, and I have no claim to your memory except one that I am ashamed of, and I still wonder how it was that you kept so calm that day in class, when I called Emily Dickinson's poem trite; I still remember the poem. It was 'A Narrow Fellow in the Grass'. You probably thought that I knew no better. But I did. That is the worst of it. I knew that I had no business saying what I did, using the word 'trite' for Emily Dickinson, for Emily Dickinson's poem, no less.

I still wonder what made me do it, what rebel-without-a-cause feeling made me want to seek that horrible sort of attention. Not that I had any sort of feeling about the poem, really, not then. Just that I wanted to have an opinion, preferably a controversial one, to air.

But I will take this opportunity to apologise, even if you will never see this, and if you do, you will neither remember nor care. Because you, and Arul and Etienne, in those 200 hours of poetry and popular music, opened up a world that may be routine for some folks, but to me, was magic; to me, was all the peaceful dissent of the world, was all its angry protest, was all its arts and faiths and voices, was all the dread of a world gone wrong, was all the hope of a world that could be, was in short, the place from which all my sense of the world derived.

One of my cherished few minutes of the twentieth century fiction course was a class where we were discussing 'No Longer at Ease', and talking about Nigeria's vicious circle of oppressed becoming oppressor. And a sort of terror took hold of me, and I asked Etienne, "But if that is true, then there is no hope for Nigeria, and other countries like Nigeria?" And Etienne said, "Of course there is. In forums like these."