The Betrayed Town and Other Poems

Preface

vii Preface I began writing poetry some thirty-five years ago and so by 1990 I had quite a sizeable collection. But I remained for the most part a closet writer, even though I would in 1977 send out one of my first poems entitled “The Betrayed Town” and it would be accepted for publication in The Anthology of Unpublished Poets, Riverview, Florida. This and my father’s ecstatic response to my endeavors encouraged me to continue. Interestingly enough, visitors to my room in Renfrew House at Carleton University, Ottawa, would themselves be exposed to some of these poems, which begged to be read as they smiled down from the walls. In my undergraduate years at Carleton, Dr. Siga Asanga would read some of the poems and write a critique. I recall that he was particularly impressed with the vignettes. Professor Victor Anomah Ngu would visit Ottawa, read some of the poems and encourage me to keep writing. Even after I returned home finally after my doctoral studies in 1984, every time we met, one of the first things he was sure to ask me was whether I had finally published my poems. Presenting him with a published copy of the book would have been my way of saying “thank you” to him for the encouragement. Sad to say this would not be possible since he died in 2011. I did not know when or if I ever would gather courage and the nerve to send the collection out for publication! In 1981, when I took a postgraduate course in Creative Writing I was finally forced to share some of my work with Professor Irving Feldman and my classmates at SUNY, Buffalo. Professor Leslie A. Fiedler, supervisor of my PhD dissertation at SUNY also read some of the poems and viii advised me to send them out to publishers. My famous response was that I would think about it. Even after I graduated from Buffalo, when I called him up on the phone one of the questions he was sure to ask me was whether I had finally made up to mind to do so. When I finally did make up my mind to do so, I could no longer carry on a long conversation with him for he was already seriously sick. I will be forever grateful to him for his continuing effort to encourage me to bring my work out. A culmination of events has brought me to this pass. Most of my poems having been composed in long hand, because I could only hunt and peck at the typewriter, the tedium of doing so which at the time could only be borne when a term paper was concerned, for as the proverbial student money was usually in short supply, I usually traveled with sheaves of writing, proofing and editing whenever or wherever I could. But election monitoring is a funny thing and in the mad rush to get out of Guinea-Conakry, where our team report was in complete dissonance with published government opinion, I would forget the bulk of my sweat back at the hotel. I can only hope that this forgotten sheaf of poems will have brought a smile to someone’s lips. But I am more than certain that they probably found their way only to the trash since they were written in English. What a waste! Learning to use the computer became a priority if I was to ascertain that I would not lose those that I could find or recall. The more poems I entered the more the idea of a book took hold as I exclaimed like the old man of “Panda Games,” “What the heck!” But not to hoist a beer! I would hoist a soda. Ralph Ellison or rather what happened to his manuscript for Juneteenth was a great signifier to me if I did not want to ix lose everything. It was time indeed for me to come in from the cold! In 2002, when I returned from my Senior Fulbright year at Howard University, Washington D.C., I had come to a decisive moment and sent the poems to John A. Lambo, Professor of English Literature at the University of Yaoundé I for his critical opinion. A busy man, teaching full time at the university and working full time at the Ministry of Higher Education, he none-the-less read through the poems and called...