05/16/2022
Ada Husman Yakubu tagged you and 4 others in a post in AFRICAN CULTURE TV.
Ada wrote:
Ulelile Rhorwu Ojor: Deshawn, Ojorumi, Patrick, Jagwan
In his masterpiece poem, Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats, one of the great romantic poets of the 19th century made an incursion into the art of beingness. The romantic poets were regarded as rebels who left the rigid age of enlightenment in literature behind. They changed poetry altogether, mostly due to their unrelenting affinity for nature, life and death. In ode to a nightingale, Keats is in the grips of melancholy as he writes:
“For many a time, I have been half in love with easeful death, Called him soft names in many a missed rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath: Now more than ever seems it rich to die,to ease upon the midnight with no paln” John Keats
You get the feeling that the poet is in this weird place where the real and the unreal collide. A sort of Rumsfeld's known of the unknown realm. Keats writes about listening to a real life nightingale perched on a tree near his window singing. The song is angelic and sweet, he wants it to last forever. However it does not as the nightingale eventually flies away and he is suddenly brought back to the doldrums of life's varied mysteries.
At the time of writing this ode, Keats had suffered a lot of loss of people very close to him. So he attempts to contemplate life and death. We live in this world, we face losses all the time. However, some loss takes your breath away. You are literally unable to breathe, so it has been since the passing of my very young cousin Deshawn Ojurumi Jagwan. His father, my beloved cousin, lost his baby so suddenly and it left us all bewildered. This baby was the quintessential gift from God. He was cool and had that star quality that just shone through. You know that ‘favored by God’ quality you can’t put your hands on.
He was like the mythical nightingale in Keats poetry, he momentarily enchanted us, captured our imagination and seduced us by redefining this beauty called life. His life was a sweet song that made the people he came across glad. He was a natural leader, the lead player and ten of his high school basketball team. He died days before he got the call to play varsity basketball. He was cute and stubborn and sweet and kind. He was larger than life. He had style that was all his own even at his young age and his parents had no problems spoiling him. He was a charmer, an academician and could handle himself. I saw him recently at his cousin's wedding and he was all smiles and thumbs up.
He was the classic African American: wearing his biracial heritage with great pride. He loved his cousins and was always rabble rousing with them. I was really having such a blast with life generally, chilling when the phone call came. You know that call. The worst nightmare for any parent/caregiver; that dreaded phone call or police visit in the dead of night that’s about your kid.
This time it was another of my First cousins calling to tell me the news. The passing of my young cousin pi**ed me off so much. I went straight from denial to anger and suddenly found myself like Keats in the middle of a nightmare. His sudden death cast a dark shadow on the entire family. It's been weeks since this happened. Yet I still wonder if it is true, that the music has fled, and do I wake or sleep? It is the sort of eerie feeling I got since the death of my little cousin. I come from one of those families, big, overachieving and sort of annoying sometimes, you know the sort, But then every once in a few decades, a kid is born in this family that is just a genius and a throwback to my grandfather. So it was well over thirty years ago when we lost my brilliant sister Angela aka Angie baby, who passed just before her 19 birthday. She was a theater arts guru and was performing way beyond her age. She was earmarked for some great things she was representing and performing internationally at her young age. Her contemporaries are the superstars in today's budding African performing arts world.
You had to have witnessed the funeral of DJ, and what his contemporaries had to say to understand the depth of his brief but extraordinary existence. In a brief moment, he wrote a legacy that most people cannot achieve in a lifetime. like Keats nightingale, his legacy will continue on. He was an African, and he was an American. He loved his African heritage as much as his American. I don’t know what happened dude, but you left us all torn up and broken in pieces. Reminding us that “Man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.” Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD)
To define my young cousin existence in the words of another great romantic poet; Blake in his Auguries of innocence; is “To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour”
Bye Baby Woodrow #10 is out.
