Red-billed Oxpecker by Chris McCully

Serengeti Songs by Chris McCully (Carcanet 2016)
Available now

When Monika and I travelled to the Serengeti in 2012, I had no intention of writing about it. Our trip was a deferred celebration of ten years of marriage. The only difference with any of the other, prior trips to African game parks we’d made was that in 2012 we hired a truck and driver for our own use rather than sharing with other tourists. Over the years we’d had some experiences that were at best distracting and at worst off-putting when we’d shared safari trucks, so in 2012 we resolved to travel with one truck and one driver. That choice turned out to be significant. We connected with Oswald on the second morning of our trip and spent the first day driving towards the Serengeti, running past herds of wildebeest and zebra and detouring to see lions. At that point, the three of us were circumspect with each other. Oswald, while professionally, highly astute, seemed relatively disengaged. For him, perhaps, we were merely another two tourists in the back of his truck. And another lion was, well, just another lion.

Chris and Oswald

            Two things happened to change us. The first was that Monika was learning Swahili. Oswald took great pleasure in teaching her to count up to twenty and in explaining some of the wrinkles in the grammar of that language. The second was that we emphasised gently to Oswald that we weren’t particularly interested in seeing the Big Five (lion, leopard, rhino, buffalo, elephant). What interested us far more, I said, was in studying how the whole ecosystem of the Serengeti fitted together and in seeing how the animals and peoples who lived there were an expression of the ecology they’d come to inhabit. Grasses, birds, insects and plants were (I said, hesitantly) in many ways just as interesting to us as capturing a leopard on camera or smiling warily at the antics of baboons.

            Oswald patiently heard me out. There was a long silence that stretched into the dust and petrol fumes of a place I’ve forgotten. For several moments I thought I’d offended him. Then he said, very quietly, ‘It’s good to know that.’

            For the next seven days the three of us explored Oswald’s Serengeti. Not only was he born there, he was multilingual; an expert botanist and ranger; a natural diplomat; an encyclopaedic guide. It turned out that we’d temporarily hired, quite by accident, the guide that the writers and photographic teams from the National Geographic hired when they were working in the region. We left other tourists behind and drove off-road, to remote kopjes (rock outcrops); we puzzled as to where baobabs would grow and where they wouldn’t; we walked through barbs of acacia; we listened as Oswald explained some of the ecological pressures faced by animals and humans alike. In the evenings, if I wasn’t too tired, I made notes, usually unpromisingly literal notes of mileages, sizes, things seen and overheard.  I stress that I hadn’t expected to do so, but there was usually a pause in the day between arrival at wherever we were going (and we stayed in some wonderful lodges as a concession to the luxury earned by ten years of marriage) and whenever dinner was going to happen. I don’t normally conduct writing life with such diligence, but I was minded of a trip Monika and I had undertaken to Crete one spring, when the wild flowers were abundant. The days passed in Greece in walking, finding, photographing. I learned more about wild flowers in that fortnight than I had before or have learned since. Years later, there in the Serengeti, I used the pauses in the rhythms of our looking to review the day’s images and fill up a notebook. I never expected to use any of the notes.  They were simply aids to memory, of a time when we were engaged with each other and with what we saw. They were code for a certain kind of happiness.

Chris and Monika

            The notes turned out to be useful in ways I could never have anticipated. Odd phrases or sentences wittered away at me for months after we’d returned from Africa. One phrase was a bird name: red-billed oxpecker. The phrase occurs on its own at the conclusion of the notes I’d made as we travelled through Tarangire:

            ‘…Rocky escarpment…is edge of Great Rift, which stretches from the Zambezi to Jordan– 6000km.

            ‘Red-billed oxpecker.’

            The more I repeated red-billed oxpecker the odder the phrase became. Its compact  Germanic compound not only generated images – oxpeckers really do peck at cattle, feeding on ticks along the animals’ backs – but also seemed to demand the generation of a context in which oxpeckers are found. And so throughout 2012 and 2013 I began to explore my fragmentary notes, working as usual in pencil, in a large hard-backed notebook. It was here the poems that eventually make up Serengeti Songs were drafted and redrafted, and often, were abandoned. I suppose that as the pieces progressed I was trying, by judicious repetitions that connected each piece with others while allowing them to remain formally distinct, to construct an ecosystem of poems (if that doesn’t sound unbearable) which would sing the natural ecosystem into imaginative being. The poems were a way of exploring the questions our trip had asked: what kind of ecosystem was this? How was it formed? Who has lived here? Why did my notes say that our glimpse of the summit of Kilimanjaro was ‘reason-defying’? Why did lionesses hunt in groups of three? How did the leopard disappear? The notes told me, as I tried to summarise the end of a day spent near Arusha that the trip had been ‘[h]ot, dusty, rough…and somewhere so far beyond mere “enjoyment” that I’m not sure where it is.’ The poems that came later were a way of finding that out as well as a means of exploring the structure of my looking.

            When, much later, I came to submit the typescript of the Serengeti Songs to Carcanet it seemed appropriate somehow to end the work in the place where it had begun – with the phrase that had generated so much mischief

Rift journal
                        An enormous Maasai in gumboots

                        lights us through the dark.

                        The hurricane lamp perches

                        on an escarpment that ends

                        four thousand miles north in Jordan.

                       

You can see the tears

in the crust from space.

Shaken bones.

Many Americans and Chinese.

                       

Red-billed Oxpecker.

                        (Serengeti Songs, 2016, p.68)

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Red-billed Oxpecker

Chris McCully

25^th March 2016

The Carcanet Blog Sale

With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.

For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Chris McCully's Serengeti Songs 

All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the codes BLOGSERENGETI at the checkout (case-sensitive). Happy reading!