Tayo Olafioye - Ruth Obee

Professor Tayo Olafioye and I have known each other but a brief time. Yet while our communication has been limited to e-mail, snail mail and telephone, I feel that he is someone I've known for much longer. The credit for this lies with Tayo's unique autobiographical collection of essays, letters and poems documenting his struggle with two potentially fatal illnesses. Through Tayo Olafioye's work, A Stroke of Hope (Malthouse Press, 2000) I have come to know Tayo, the human being, as a tender father of a young daughter, a loyal husband, a writer, poet and college professor, and above all, a man robustly in love with life. He is also someone who is blessed with an extensive and caring coast-to-coast network of friends and relations, many of whom also claim Nigerian roots. This is, in short, a man happily in the prime of his life who has stood on the brink, looked death in the face - then has written about it.

Tayo Olafioye is one who knows the name of "Gratitude." He pays generous tribute to those he believes merit it. These include the physicians who cared for him during his illnesses. High recognition is given to them both for their skills and for their courage via the time-honored oral convention of the African praise poem. Having lived in East Africa myself, I was reminded of Masai warriors who, in the old days, tested their strength, both physical and mental, by tweaking the lionÈs tail. Surgeons do require such courage.

Tayo Olafioye is like so many of us who have lived outside our own cultures for extended periods of time. He is something of a global nomad and a third-culture kid (TCK) all rolled into one . ("Kid" in this case is a fitting appellation since Professor Olafioye began his academic career in the U.S. as a college student. Thus, his cross-cultural experiences began when he was young.) And despite what he has known or experienced of oppression in all its despicable forms, whether by black despots or white neo-colonialists, Tayo Olafioye is never in the least bit xenophobic. He seeks out the humanity in the other in a manner bespeaking a deeply-rooted African humanism.

How did Tayo Olafioye and I chance to "meet"? Very simply we share the privilege of knowing, both as friend and mentor, one of the great African writers of the 20th century, EsÈkia Mphahlele. Mphahlele, now in his early 80s and still going strong despite the hardships of his early upbringing, will be remembered, among other achievements, for his noted autobiography Down Second Avenue. Translated into more than a dozen languages, it remains, even today, one of the definitive autobiographies about growing up in a black South African township during the heyday of apartheid. Tayo was Mphahlele's student at University of Denver in Colorado where Mphahlele - by this time a political exile - himself earned his Ph.D. and served on the faculty as an English professor from the years 1966 to 1974.

In Stroke of Hope, two lines stand out with unusual meaningfulness as revealing both the African-ness and the spirituality of Tayo Olafioye. In a farewell statement of gratitude, Olafioye writes: "To my students of the past and present, at home or abroad, I am profoundly thankful to have met you. One generation replaces the other. It never grows old." In echoes of a praise poem, he then names the names of those who have contributed to his scholarship and states: "None of you are African but you sang to me universal tunes of kindness, care, and scholarship. If I ever meet God, I'll tell Him I know you."

I will conclude this brief essay by quoting from two poems by Tayo Olafioye that combine craftsmanship with lyricism as well as a strong narrative voice. The poems make clear that death is out there to be feared like an old lion that no longer can hunt its normal prey. But there are several spears in one's arsenal to defend oneself with. One such is humor. And humor may even be able to out-laugh death.

In "Now that I am well," Olafioye writes:

I carry the sun within me
My nights are lit with the full moon
Every new day the dawn inspires me
I hear the birds chirping in unison with the
Waterfalls
Nature's chorus of fidelity.

And with wry humor combined with personal insight Olafioye writes in "My Epitaph - whenever":

Here sleeps the pretender:
Tayo Peter Olafioye,
Rehearsing death.

The poem then ends on an autobiographic note with an unequivocal declaration of the poet's African-ness:

A fish, he was
In many ponds of culture
In many a stream of civilization,
Some say: Colorful
But always an African at heart.

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