Sustenance

Words by Oge Nwosu, Music by Laura Reid, Vocals spoken and sung by Gweneth Ann Rand. Additional vocals by Nwenenda Horsefall. Image by Heidi Stellar. Oge Kpalukwuozu Nwosu is a UK based librettist and former barrister. An alumna of Cambridge University and Guildhall, her MA chamber opera, produced in association with ROH, was recommissioned by the V&A Museum. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and an Invited Artist at the Women Opera Makers Workshop of the Academie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. SUSTENANCE: Tête á Tête Note, July 2023. Recently I wrote a micro-opera with Laura, titled Detritus. Commissioned by ROH Jette Parker programme and Casco Phil as a site specific piece, performed at St Pancras Station on International Women’s Day, its protagonist was St Anthony of Padua, Patron Saint of Lost Things, involuntarily transplanted into life as a Cleaner at the station. He was essentially a Displaced Person - one who had never set foot on a national or international train - struggling to make sense of his purpose in that place and time. That theme - movement compelled under unfathomable circumstances - set a precedent for the work I have subsequently created with Laura. The real and fictional global micro-stories contained in Sustenance sit ‘naturally’ in the city, but my primary impulse was to bring The World to the rural setting of the original project. Because, as Laura has perspicaciously observed, The World has passed through Dorset across history; animate and inanimate entities, transported by ship and air and foot, travel and trade and learning and aid, colouring fields and coasts and conversations. So, movement of all kinds. This lyric - if it can be called that - gives voice to headlines rather than people, and exists as much in its footnotes as in the sparsely sketched stories. The people represent a multiplicity of footnotes in recent history, each one at a liminal point between grief and hope, survival and erasure. No comment is made on the events and no specific emotion is demanded of the listener. The separate lines of text are united by one repeated phrase; Nka bu örom. The choice of Ikwerre as the language of this phrase is both as random and as specific as each of the stories it follows. Two facts make it relevant to me as the writer of the piece; Ikwerre is the language of the part of Rivers State, Nigeria, in which my father was born; and this phrase was the first he taught me. It means This is my house. I used to enjoy saying it when we welcomed guests into the unfamiliar houses we moved into. Here, in this lyric, it extends to mean something like the Earth is home to all of us. Beyond that, there is no direct connection between the language and the acts outlined here, just as there is no direct link between a human being’s innate essence and the random bolts of fortune that might unexpectedly assail them. I use it to capture a spirit of welcome, or stoicism, a brief reflection on radical acts that embody or sustain hope. The deliberately un-poetic text begins with the journey of a foetus from its dying mother into a hostile, fractured world. This was an imagined story, written months before the most recent instance of real life appearing to intersect with fiction. The succeeding lines all reference singular personal events, huge in the lives of those living through them, all or some of which you will be aware of from news sources. Links to these lives are included in the footnotes to the lyric. Oge Kpalukwuozu Nwosu July 2023. SUSTENANCE1 Theffania quickening, in the carriage - crushed.2 Nka bu örom. Pia steering, a small boy’s body frozen on the boat.3 Nka bu örom. Aamira, at the station, with a ticket and her textbooks.4 Nka bu örom. Ines embroiders ‘Assamaka’ on the shoes she leaves behind.5 Nka bu örom. Nasruddin, defiant, wades the water for the women.6 Nka bu örom. Anakaren cries before a camera, for a prize.7 Nka bu örom. Johannes, aged, with the bruises of the blows of the hammer to his head.8 Nka bu örom. This woman, nameless, grasps a knife, inscribes - 9 Nka bu örom. 1 A multiplicity of contemporary voices, real and fictional, each at a liminal point between grief and hope, all united through a single phrase; “Nka bu örom.” (Ikwerre.) Translation: “This is my house”. (And, by extension, here, “The Earth is home to us all.”) It is used here in a spirit of stoicism, or welcome - radical activity that sustains hope. 2 ‘Quickening’ as in feeling the foetus move inside her. 3 Captain Pia Klemp, TedxBerlin, 2019. https://youtu.be/-7V1zNNfc_Q 4 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/10/home-office-backs-down-over-travel- costs-for-eritrean-refugeesitting-gcses?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther 5 https://niger.iom.int/stories/sewing-centre-support-womens-resilience-assamaka 6 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/26/indonesian-villagers-defy-covid-19-warnings- to-rescue-rohingyarefugees?CMP=ShareiOSAppOther 7 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/world/americas/mexico-day-of-the-dead.html? smid=nytcore-ios-share%20https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/world/americas/mexico-day- of-the-dead.html?referringSource=articleShare 8 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/pensioner-79-told-shouldnt-country-23039708 9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53436335 Copyright Oge Nwosu 2023