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Wizard of the
Two Niles
Poems
Mohamed A. Eno
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© Copyright 2015 Mohamed A. Eno.
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Contents
Introduction .....................................................................vii
PART I A WIZARD’S WORLD .................................... 1
Wizard’s Whispers ............................................................ 3
Wizard of the Two Niles ................................................... 4
Ritual Sacrifi ce .................................................................. 5
The Wizard’s Morning Ritual ........................................... 6
The Wizard’s Afternoon Ritual ........................................ 7
The Wizard’s Evening Ritual ............................................ 8
The Wizard’s Incantation .................................................. 9
The Wizard’s Trumpet .....................................................10
College of Nilotic Wizardry .............................................11
The Wizard’s Twins .........................................................12
Wizardry Clientele ...........................................................13
The Wizard’s Wittiness ....................................................14
Wizard of Wizards ...........................................................15
The Wizard at a Wedding ................................................16
Wizards’ Gala ..................................................................17
The Wizard’s Incarceration ..............................................18
The Return of the Wizard ................................................19
Revelations ...................................................................... 20
PART II BOGUS CHIEF’S HOOTING HOLE ...........21
Acts Too Insane! ............................................................. 23
Victim of Fortuitous Sights ..............................................24
The Chief’s Hooting Hole ............................................... 25
Sodom and Gomorrah Theatre ....................................... 26
Inside Senior Chief’s Prayer Room ...................................27
Empowering the Chief .................................................... 28
PART III LEARNING THE LESSONS OF OUR
UN LEA RN ING ........................................... 29
In the Spirit of Our (Un)“Shared Values” ........................31
Shabab vs. “Shared Values” ..............................................32
Imposters a.k.a. Islamists ................................................ 33
Lessons on Youth Education ........................................... 34
From Orphans to Army Men .......................................... 35
“Rescue” Operation ......................................................... 36
The Blame Game .............................................................37
Singing the Same Old Song ............................................. 38
Atrocious Institutions ..................................................... 39
PART IV NOT ALL ARE TOO INNOCENT .............41
A Veiled Samaritan ......................................................... 43
Arms under the Veil ....................................................... 44
Smart in Veil ................................................................... 45
Venomous Veil ................................................................ 46
vii
Introduction
Ninkii wareegaaw walaa aragee, Wiineey Rooble waa!*
One who wanders (odd hours) encounters surprises (the
unexpected) / Oh, isn’t this Wiineey Rooble!
A Maay Somali folktale goes that Wiineey Rooble, a young
female, was so obsessed with folk dance that she would
travel long distances, no matter how late the hours of the
night, to attend one of such events of entertainment. In this
particular episode, she was woken up in the middle of the
night by the faint sound of singers very distant. She sneaked
out of the house, tracing the sound toward the direction
it was coming from. She was not bothered by either the
distance or the loneliness through the forest in which she
traveled. As she approached the scene of the dance, she
could hear a leader singer/poet introducing the next verse
to the singers:
Ninkii wareegaaw walaa aragee / Wiineey Rooble waa!
One who wanders (odd hours) encounters surprises (the
unexpected) / Oh, isn’t this Wiineey Rooble!
As she came closer, she became stunned by the fact that
she was a subject of discussion—not knowing how they
could recognize her as she had not informed anyone of her
trip. Indeed Wiineey Rooble had to deal with an unusual
situation because, contrary to her expectation, the dancers
viii
she had strived to join were not humans but a group of Jinn
enjoying themselves away from the vicinity of humans.
In these poems, the imaginary peculiar and the experiences
lived comingle in versatile rhythms and rhymes. Whether
the anthological presentation of the imaginary or the
demonstration of the experiences or whether both were
coincidental is a matter for readers to decide, drawing
their own perceptions of yet another imaginary tale in
which the narrative leads them rather than the narrator.
This is because some of the narratives exhibited here
are indeed unusual and would require a great deal of
patience on the part of the reader to separate what was
the original imaginary and what has been encountered as
peculiar experience that had disturbed the narrator prior
to the narrativization of the odd encounter. On the other
hand, the complex world of experience has a variety of
underpinning factors: Is the experience in question a lived
one? Is it a seen or witnessed reality? Does it relate to the
imagery and imagination of the narrator, writer, or author,
etc.? Are the observations through the imagination and the
subjects of the imagery metaphorical? Or, is the experience
an authorial portrayal of a social reality shared or witnessed
by others? These, in my opinion, offer a refl ection of
how a reader/decoder will interpret the poetic narratives
expressed in the verses and at their disposal. The aim, as
I’ve done here, is to present to the reader what to refl ect
on, and the type of refl ection, the quality of meaning to be
made out of the narrative and narration, is to be left to the
reader. This is what I have done in many of the poems in
this collection.
* My translation
1
Part I
A Wizard’s World
3
Wizard’s Whispers
The harder the society strives
To erect enviable structures
In knowledge and enlightenment
The more the wizard wanes the efforts
Often in the dark of the night
Many a time he’s been a cause
Of the citizens’ delirium
Since he has a monopoly
On the incumbent’s ear
While wandering in the royal court
He whispers into it for hours
Every word in the book of hypocrisy
So no one is here no more
In this hut we call a home
4
Wizard of the Two Niles
A frail, skeletal body with shaggy
gray hair,
Hollow cheeks gutted in
from every corner of the face
He comes as naked as an old stick
in a desert –
A stick anguished by the peeling
of its skin eons ago;
At the sickening sight
the chiefs and elders dropped down
on their knees.
Hastily they murmured prayers
Supplications for safety.
As he approached the village
the eyes of the shadowy fi gure swell
to the size of a fi st.
The horror fl ushed embryos out of
their cozy shelters.
From the horizon spirits stooped out of
hideouts of smoke
and the extraneous male fi gure fell into fi ts
A crocodile skin dangled from one shoulder,
a calabash of blood on the head
Human genitals in the hand
And swinging and swaggering from the depth
of his muddy butthole was
A huge ceremonial horn of a rhino.
5
Ritual Sacrifice
He chewed a mixture of cobwebs
and unroasted coffee beans. In
trembling hands he held two hens
in a tightly knotted bag. He wore
a weirdly stitched yellow robe
with large pockets up on the chest
and on the back. With every exhale
he puffed a gush of heavy-smelling
tobacco made from home-brewed
weird leaves. Then splatters of
odorous blood on the doorsteps
awakened goose bumps on the inhabitants.
Inexplicable inscriptions on the eastern walls
of every house startled the residents: a deadly
spell of mysterious witchery cast on us by
an old wizard from the Two Nile.
6
The Wizard’s Morning Ritual
Like in the snobbish corners
Of Nairobi’s Westland
Or the posh quarters of
Mogadishu’s new Lido
In the rich environs of
My new home’s Utalii Club
Lives a crafty magician.
He licks his feet a dozen times
At every day’s dusk and dawn
Solemnly he showers too
With the urine of a concubine
Mixed with amassed saliva
From his adult female child
Infantile in size and mind.
7
The Wizard’s Afternoon Ritual
After every lunch hour he attends
To a date with the call of nature.
At this time every day, he must
Defecate in the kitchen, right next
To a massive pot of hot fi sh bones.
Here, spirits of strenuous Jinn tribes hold
Their ancestral feast behind a
Smothering oven of human sacrifi ces
Donated the previous night.
At the peak of the ritual
He dances head down, bottom up
His fl ailing tiny legs in the air
As he drinks greenish fl uid
Trickling down from his hosepipe.
8
The Wizard’s Evening Ritual
Foaming smoke fl ies out
From a crystal vase adjacent
To heavy heaps of clay
Made of sickly tobacco phlegm
Tiny spirits in curling waves
Crawl from the heavens
Clad in camoufl age gear
Amidst cascades of cocoons
The wizard wanes into wild winds
Half an eye popped into the east
Half hinged on the center forehead
Fountains of blood from every surface
A fowl-like phantom falls from heaven
To feast with the host of cannibals
Housed in wizard’s home
Who conquer societal calm
Down to the basin of death’s anger
9
The Wizard’s Incantation
Upon entering the mosque
He jets out three or four salvos
Deafening heavy rockets
Brand-named Wizardo-Jet-Fart.
The explosion entices
Ghastly spirits into
Dances of Nilotic tunes
In one dance he defrosted
Petrifi ed hooligans, who left
The earth many centuries ago
Only to fathom among them
Himself but in disguise
As the head ghost of wickedness
10
The Wizard’s Trumpet
A trumpet was blown
From inside the house
With no evident signs of life
But a few rabbits and fi ngers of a hen
Hidden under the mat of a magician
Most disrespected in the Blue Nile.
From the toilet chirped a choked child
Gutting splashes of fl oodwater
Into every loose end of an alley
Scaring all the humans in the heavy fl oat
Of the trumpet blown from the aged anus
Of the chief sorcerer of the Two Niles.
11
College of Nilotic Wizardry
At work when he appeared
From the distance one day
Offi ce ware violently fl oated
In a terrifying whirlwind
Expressionless staff involuntarily
Became deactivated
A disorganized executive rushed
Out of the compound
Went down with distressful shriek
A desolate cry of apology
Senior Nilotic comrades paraded
Chanting with huge rosaries
Hanging down the neck
Glorious lyrics of praise buzzing
For the compatriot just promoted
From head cleaner to head of Faculty
Of Magical Arts and Sciences
At the College of Nilotic Wizardry.
12
The Wizard’s Twins
Waiting for the verdict heightened
communal anxiety
Incessant deliberations consumed
brains of the brainy
Until the chief justice of the baboon
community reaffi rmed
The ruling by the judge of the chimpanzee
domestic court:
Exhibited evidence supported
without doubt
Uncle Wizard’s fathering of the
mysterious twins
Born to a defendant she-gorilla
a fortnight earlier
Whom he’d impregnated a
decade ago today
In a city of the Blue Nile
dubbed the Horn.
13
Wizardry Clientele
In the wizard’s house in Island Village
They discovered a double-tongued cat
With three eyes on the head’s back
It becomes white under the moon
And turns under the sun into blue
At dawn one tongue sings
In glory of the wizard
At noon the other wages a war
Of words to the wizard
Till he marries her in the evening
14
The Wizard’s Wittiness
The authorities summoned the wizard one day
To explain about the neighbors’ complaints
Of a mysterious scuffl e among unseen speakers
Strong smell of tobacco with no smokers in sight
Before advancing to another question
A client of the wizard entered the arena
With a couple of enormous escorts
Who called off the inquiry
On grounds of the alien protection code
The incumbent had duly encoded
15
Wizard of Wizards
Three voices gossip on a dark rainy night
The listeners remain keen, though quiet
Of a female complainant over a male
Accused of stealing goods unmentionable
But as the moonlight returns
Three fi gures disappear on the horizon:
The wizard, the chief, and the wife
16
The Wizard at a Wedding
During the wedding ceremony
The poet’s song unravels secrets
Of man-to-man companionship
A vexed wizard sends
A wingless eagle into the air
The leader produces milk
Out of a pregnant male bee
The wizard’s wife casts
Disability onto the leader
Citizens stampede out of the town
Houses lay leveled to the ground
Lions and leopards in a long laughter
17
Wizards’ Gala
It was long time coming, spectacularly
We awaited
Locking wed with a wizard’s daughter
Waned the life of
Middilu, the crippled groom and crawler
Who’d learned too little in life
He was alerted of the looming tragedy
The devious clans of lepers
Secret gatherings in his courtyard
His oblivion after the fi rst attack
Saw us bereaving his departure
Well prior to his ultimate demise.
18
The Wizard’s Incarceration
Upon extracting its gist
The wizard blazed the scripts
He cursed the rain
For sustaining the yield
He slaughtered a cow
After suckling its milk dry
He attempted to scare off
A host of alien exorcists
He suspended his wife
To elude with a concubine
He exalted white ghosts
To take up the leadership
After the enemies’ message
For a duel engagement
And hid the armory away
He advised idiotic followers
To indulge in fratricide
So he’d assume inheritance
Of the abandoned royal court
Unknown he’d wake up one day
Incarcerated in the regal bunker
19
The Return of the Wizard
Like a nomad’s camel in the desert
Wizard of the Two Niles came wearing
Large wooden rings on the neck
Dried shrubs stuck in the lower lip
Smelling like a decomposed pig
Left at the dumpster for days
From a nylon basket on his back
Hung the leg of a pinkish toddler
In the other one in his hand
Intestines were squeezing each other
And he walked stripped along the street
His disorderly genitals dancing and dangling
Before his terrifying belly swollen
20
Revelations
In the district hospital
Where the wizard’s daughter works
Missing organs of the dead
Became the order of the day
Until one day when the corpse
Of a devil worshipper’s child
Jumped out of the wizard’s bag
Which the daughter had smuggled out
Between the fat thighs under her apron
21
Part Two
Bogus Chief’s Hooting Hole
23
Acts Too Insane!
Secret that spreads like wildfi re
Defi es the norm of containment
Leaving its custodian with agony
For, silence prevailed under oppression
Blazes the heart of even the heartless
No matter what the healing process
Disregarding culture and faith
Certainly causes doom to the duo
Who so audaciously did the undoable
24
Victim of Fortuitous Sights
Many are blamed for not seeing
What they had a duty to do so
Many are vilifi ed for seeing
What they were not to see
Deliberately or accidentally
For the actors of the acts seen
Design the acts to be enacted
And the enforcement agents
Are trained to condemn the seer
Of the unsightly sight he’d seen
25
The Chief’s Hooting Hole
I recall that day and
The scene of the incident
And the sight…
The shocking sight that was
A precursor to my undoing;
Bogus Chief’s loose dress
Was turned up
Over his forward-bending head
His hands fi rm
On a desk at the front
The ugly wizard Frail Gray
Glued to his behind
Bumping to and fro into him
I don’t know what and why
The chief groaned and groaned –
Of pain, or joy? I don’t know which;
But aimfully Senior Chief responded
To the rough rhythm and rhyme
Of wizardly Gray’s body motion.
Whenever the desert breeze
Of the winter evening rode in
With the old wizard’s rusty rod
Lo! I heard
Senior Chief’s hooting rectum
Like a faulty ’50s Fiat Five-Hundred.
26
Sodom and Gomorrah Theatre
…and the litigant peasant calls
To the academic society
And the learned on the bench
Of secluded Desert Court:
Am I culpable for witnessing
The hideous sight I did see?
Or should you curse Senior Chief
For donating his private back
To elderly Frail Gray?
I challenge the adjudicators of
The Sodom and Gomorrah Theater:
Would you give the guilty verdict
To the coincidental spectator?
Or would you convict of crime
Performers of the ugly drama
In that chilly winter evening
Who acted it in public offi ce?
Neither had Senior Chief a word to say
Nor had Frail Gray been able to show up
As the chief judge ordered recess
To leave a crucial case undetermined
27
Inside Senior Chief’s
Prayer Room
Like pictures of ancient Egyptian writings
Unfathomable drawings appear in the royal court
Patterns embossed with congealed blood
Surrounded by large stains of puss and mucous
Over them fl ocks of hungry fl ies feasting
And our emperor’s servants every other while
Parade earnestly with jars of frankincense smoking
A religious ritual honoring a horned monster
Hanging over the papyrus of the old painting
28
Empowering the Chief
Across the scene lay incapacitated humans
The early comers for the day’s work
The disturbing view mesmerized the cleric
Who’d arrived to de-bewitch the compound
Only to become another victim at the entrance
By the time the paramedics arrived
The victims had disappeared mysteriously
The rest recovered from a temporary hypnosis
The wizard very active in the parking lot
A pot of Nilotic Karkadde juice in the right hand
The left one rotating a chain of green rosaries
Around the soaked head of the chief offi cer
29
Part III
Learning the Lessons
of Our Unlearning
31
In the Spirit of Our
(Un)“Shared Values”
A couple of incidents in Paris attracted
An amalgam of Western allies
From America to Israel
Western values were shared
Solidarity to avenge
For the blood of innocent victims
Under a couple of dozen;
Earlier we lost in Africa humans
Over thousands and unaccountable
From the Horn to the heart of Abuja
Just a few unworthy lives wasted
Far away in the heart of darkness
A people not we share so much with
Values as our Western values
Despite the “Shared Values” treaty
We so cleverly duped them into
32
Shabab vs. “Shared Values”
How futile our regional authorities
How vain the security treaties signed
What a shame to the hi-tech economies
We earn from emerging industries
How hollow the “shared values” approach
And the billions spoiled in the cause
For, imposters self-named The Youth
Stole the opportunity to engage
“The wretched of the earth” among us
Thus innocent victims pay the price
Of the looming disaster we disdained
33
Imposters a.k.s. Islamists
At the heart of the Horn’s forests
Brigands of outlaws established
Ultra-modern institutions
They offer advanced education
Skills in the combat sciences
To the underage the state ignored
Owing to the leaders’ lust
For individual wealth creation
34
Lessons on Youth Education
In camps for subversive training
Children live with distorted image
Of life they learned as worthless
And The Youth inebriated them
With hatred to whole mankind
Indoctrination of the unorthodox
Inculcation of ideological farce
35
From Orphans to Army Men
In the land called the Horn
Ahead of committing fratricide
The elite instigate infanticide
As the norm of out-group cleansing
When an entire orphanage came
Under the attack of her ethnic militia
Amina saved her clan compatriots
Before denouncing on the local media
The atrocities of the ill-fated orphans
Although she orchestrated them a week earlier
36
“Rescue” Operation
Our army commander’s kids called
From a top college in the West
In a quick change of mood
He convened
The callous boys of Kun Dile
A squad called “Killers of a Thousand”
To conduct their “routine rescue operation”
In just a couple of hours
Corpses were strewn in the streets
Had an ugly story to tell
Tens of looted vehicles
Fully loaded with booty
The commander is escorted
To the nearest Express Transfer
To “rescue” his family in Europe
From hunger and starvation
And expulsion from varsities
Due to a lack of tuition fees
37
The Blame Game
The political pimping of one another
The blame game stays much a reality
Societal neglect of the ethics agency
Crowning favoritism in ethnic jingoism
Intricacies that perplex the detachment
Of bygone anomalies form present riddles
The ills and animosities sown within
Repudiate a remedy to homeland Africa
Diminishing aspirations of yesterday’s fi ght
Into the painful glum of our nothingness today
Under a leadership lost in a bedeviled journey
No farther than fi lling the belly and the pocket
38
Singing the Same Old Song
In the nationalist school hymn
They taught us
The foreigners crept into the land
In the dark
At daylight everything was subjected
Under their control
So I adored chanting the lyrical composition
Condemning the aliens:
Oppressors, looters, dominators, exploiters
Till the intruders departed in disgrace
But duplicates dragged in a doctrine
Not so different in the new dictionary
That decades of fi ve later we do sing:
Dictators, suppressors, pillagers, abusers
39
Atrocious Institutions
In Africa’s region of the Horn
Where iniquity embraces atrocity
The abuse of children eludes
The eyes of the authority
Whose absurdity for accumulation
Exceeded the norms of avarice
In the Horn as we see it every day
Mysteries of the unexpected occur
As the norm and not the exception
Even when orphanages are turned
Overnight into illicit army camps
It is an average life in the Horn
Where the underage are trained on
The application of vicious atrocities
Under the laws of heinous inhumanity
41
Part IV
Not All Are Too Innocent
43
A Veiled Samaritan
He owes his survival
To the veiled Samaritan
Who tipped me about
A looming destruction
That rocked the earth
All around the vicinity
As he hurried round the corner
His fear-stricken feet too sluggish
A horrendous blast thundered
From the scene he had just left
The familiar voice of
The female he’d left home
Echoed astonishing words
Into his unbelieving ears
Advising him to escape
Immediately
From a suicidal raid she’d organized
44
Arms under the Veil
How beautiful her pious words
Admonition that purifi es the heart
They offered her a graceful welcome
Even made her an educator honorable
In the all-female grand mosque
But society’s suspicion was aroused
On why in a city reputable for peace
Fatal eruptions engulfed environments
A short while after she had left the area.
Though she disclaimed any wrongdoing
They discovered her with modern gadgets
She used to relay messages across nations
With codes such as white monkeys, caterpillars
Brown goats, pretty serpents, hungry larvae
And confi rmations like canoe capsized.
45
Smart in Veil
Pious Suleqa is a worshipper
Donned in a guru ninja’s outfi t
When men strive out for a living
She schools the females at home
In the evening when the males return
To the mess she crafted in the day
She assumes a role among the mediators
In favor of squashing the marriage
In her bid of enticing every man
For the post of a loyal concubine
46
Venom ous Veil
She is fond of spitting at the fi replace
Where aunts lay uncharacteristic eggs
Where strange amphibians populate
And a servant delivers them at the market
For the customers from Juju Island
Where our ancestral spirits abandoned
In melancholy of magical attacks
Spelled off by a wicked lady in a veil