Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - LA Vonda: A Tribute by TF

 LA Vonda: A Tribute by TF

"As if we hadn't completed an embrace,

that is how we are left. 

As if with a pregnant silence...

do you hear it?"

 

 

 

The mid-afternoon was dark, with an unusual snow and cold tormenting the semi-desert land of heat.  The afternoon was faking a departure, for the night was still far away. The news, through warm words communicated by Ikhide's coldness, became the broken branch in the still night of the Nigerian April.  Ikhide is a master of interference, yesterday and today, and he brewed yet another interference, the hot coffee that burnt our tongues.

 

The words silenced us for a moment. A moment was dead. At that very moment, the dead moment, a pregnancy was terminated: La Vonda is gone. But the voice told us that La Vonda lives. The miscarriage was fake?Or is this not how they told us, the joy of living and the melancholia of unliving? That is how they told you and I that Sister La Vonda is gone, with an incantation on the endurance of memory. So she is still with us?  It might be so, as the dead assures the living. The dead can speak?

 

Many never met her. They knew her by words, encouraging, discouraging, elevating, sweet, hurtful, sincere, "hit and run". We first knew her, and then later we met her. Her words are melted into a big mirror, now hanging on a wall as a text written on an Islamic tablet, fading but legible, script of time, only decodable with patience.  We must unmask, we must reveal ourselves for that wall wants to show itself, with the text before us touching our hearts.

La Vonda's words turned into images, visible symbols, sometimes still, looking at us, gazing, shaking her head as in the always moving neck of Bolaji Aluko that comes with each declaration, minor and major. The images acquire multiple eyes, fixed. We stand still, unable to move forward, and our bodies become the lodging rooms of pain and agony. Our hearts bleed. La Vonda then begins to laugh at us, mockingly. Why?

 

Her history remains. You and I have a problem: we do not know where we are headed. La Vonda has a home, we have hearts. In that home lies joy and happiness, and in your hearts lodge pain. La Vonda's home tells stories, about you and I. We are welcome to listen, in our rainbow coalition.

 

But the roof of her home has collapsed. Or may be not, but this is what my heart reveals to me. If so, we can no longer go through the door, front or back. There are no longer chairs in the room and the table, too, is gone. Death has killed the moonlight stories and the talebearer. Or may be the roof can be restored, so that La Vonda lives. And then there is a corner which she occupies, sympathizing with our own sorrows and tumult that we add up and subtract from, to make up life.

 

"The simple truth is that I do not know whether or not she died, but I do know that her history, her time, is here, with us, with those of us who enter her home because she opened the door to us, and she did it because yes, because she wanted to.  Because there are hearts that are so large they only beat when they are with others."

 

 La Vonda, Rest in Perfect Peace. Disguise and enter the womb of a pregnant woman, so that in nine month's time, we have an Iyabo.

O dabo na.        By for now

O di arin na ko      We may meet by accident on the road side

O do ju ala         We may meet in dreams.

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

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