CONVERSATION WITH DR. HALIMA SEKULA

By Isaac Attah Ogezi Dr. Halima Sekula attended the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, where she obtained her B. A., M.A and Ph.D in literature. She cut her creative writing teeth while as an undergraduate and was an active member of the Creative Writers’ Club. Her early works were published in the anthology, Poetry from A. B. U, edited by Muazu Maiwada. Since then she has never looked back in her dream to bring African literature to a higher height both as a teacher and a writer. Her published works include Tongues of Flame (poetry, 2005) and Honour Among Thieves (drama, 2006). Some of her poems and short stories have also been published in various national and international literary journals and anthologies such as Transverse, The Halifax Review, Drumvoices Revue, Lorraine and James Penwomenship among others. Her first novel will be published later this year. She currently lectures at the Department of English, Nasarawa State University, Keffi. Her hobby is collecting of beads from different parts of the world. In this interview with Isaac Attah Ogezi, she bares her mind on issues that inspire her, her views on writing, background, publications and many others. OGEZI: Can you tell us a little about yourself? HALIMA: I’m Halima Sekula. I lecture with Nasarawa State University, Keffi, in the Department of English. I teach literature. My reading English at the University brought me into contact with some of the best writers in Africa and other parts of the world. I went to ABU, Zaria again for my M. A. and Ph.D after my first degree there. OGEZI: When and how did you start writing? HALIMA: I started when I was an undergraduate in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. We had this Creative Writers’ Club (CWC). I was a member. So, you know, meeting with like-minded students made me realize that writing fiction is something achievable. And also in the university, I took creative writing courses where we were taught as students the craft and forms of creative writing. Of course, as a student who majored in literature, I came across numerous poems and plays written by truly great people and it served as an inspiration. And also I published in university journals as an undergraduate, for example, Poems form A. B. U, edited by Muazu Maiwada. After graduation and national service, I went back to school for my M. A. and during that period, I concentrated so much at specializing in my field that I didn’t write much. Of course, I kept on reading even outside the prescribed texts. You know, ABU, Zaria, has this huge collection of literary works in Kashim Ibrahim Library, Samaru Campus, which I took advantage of. I read other literature from other parts of the world – Russian, English, French and American. So far, I have published two books – a collection of poems, Tongues of Flames in 2005 and a play, Honour Among Thieves in 2006. OGEZI: What is your collection Tongues of Flames all about? HALIMA: I don’t know if a writer is supposed to discuss the themes of her work, but since you’re forcing me into a corner, I’ll say the poems in that collection look into aspects of existence in post-colonial Nigeria. In general, I’m concerned with issues of individual survival in a nation that is struggling to achieve true development. OGEZI: In the opening poem, ‘Rupture’, perhaps, the manifestoe poem of the entire collection, you celebrated your resilience in singing again after a storm. What does poetry mean to you? Is it a kind of consolation after the trials and travails of life? HALIMA: Poetry for me is beyond consolation because poetry itself deals with every aspect of existence. So like I mentioned earlier, what I’m celebrating in that poem was as if a dead part of me has come to life. Poetry should be like a living vibrant thing. It was just like a period of three to four years but it was like a decade or more for me. That is not to say all the poems here are personal experiences. OGEZI: I’ve also discovered that in the first part of the collection, you dwelt at length on themes that affect women generally, such as polygamy, wife inheritance, betrayal, poverty and divorce. HALIMA: Yes. First of all, my gender is female and the issues or crises of daily living which concern women especially from the Northern Nigerian angle, I’m not saying that the other regions do no have these problems, but I’m more acquainted with this part of the country which I know very well. For instance, the issue of wife inheritance in ‘The New Wife’, it’s supposed to help the family’s continuity but where does the woman’s individual needs come? Must she always love or accept her husband who is a relation to the late husband? Polygamy is Islamically correct but when it is practiced in ways that negatively impact on wives and children, it becomes a social problem. ‘The Old Pot’, we’re talking about a woman who is already in crisis because there is no enough money to feed the family yet the husband is bringing in a new woman to share in his little earnings. However, it is not in all the poems that crisis situations are shown. ‘Black Mother’, for example, is a celebration of the African woman as a farmer, a mother who feeds not only her own children but the world. OGEZI: In the second part of the collection, your thematic concerns went beyond the plight of women to encompass themes such as hypocrisy in ‘My Good Friends’, child labour in ‘Boy Hawker in Nyanya’, inordinate affection or love in ‘Closed Spaces’ and jealousy in ‘Tears They Shed’. ‘Closed Spaces’ particularly appeals to me in this part because of the philosophy behind it and the universal truth that it preaches. Do you mind to read the poem for us? HALIMA: Yes. [Reads] When we touch and cling To people with such force Tenderness and true care Are stifled for lack of breath The birth of a new era Forces closed spaces To breed rank weeds Of putrefied weariness Steeped in disdainful need Hands clasped tight Around craning necks Force out clean breaths of love. OGEZI: Thank you. What experience informed you to write that poem? HALIMA: Sometimes when you say what informed you to write a particular poem, it could be a conglomeration of many experiences or many things seen or heard. It might be one’s profound experiences or somebody else’s. I love watching people interacting. Perhaps, it was one of these experiences. This particular poem was probably informed by my observations of human interaction. Like I said earlier, I’m interested in how the individual survives in the society and I realized that interrelationships are mutual but when one party is asking too much, too early of another, it can create the opposite of what is intended. OGEZI: In ‘Tears They Shed’, about the most formalistically accomplished poem in the entire collection, I’m impressed by how the line arrangement is able to depict the theme of jealousy very aptly in the poem. How did you achieve this feat? HALIMA: Through experimentation. Sometimes, the poem is influenced by what I want to say. And, of course, it also deals with universal values of people who find it easy to attempt to destroy successful people. OGEZI: In the last part, which contains four poems centred on social commentary, you expressed your cynicism at the ineptitude of our leaders to fulfil their promises especially in the poem ‘Independence Day’. Must a poet always be cynical and gloomy? HALIMA: It’s unfortunate that I’m living in an era where the facts of my country are often gloomy. So perhaps that’s what is reflected in my poetry. Daily experiences, facts and figures, show that Nigeria is an underdeveloped country. Daily we talk about corruption, inadequate leadership, about lack of opportunities for young people to grow, that is, grow socially, politically, and economically. Year in, year out, we cannot come out and say this situation was terrible last year or five years ago but we’re better this year. For the past five years, we’ve been without electricity, water and other social amenities. Can’t we be gloomy? For instance, in this year’s Independence Day, are we sure we are going to get a trickle of water? The poem, ‘Forty Years’, I personified Nigeria as a human being of forty years and I could only depict a human being in despair. OGEZI: I’ve noticed that in your poetry, the reader hardly knows anything about your personal life, your emotions, pains and triumphs as a writer unlike the American poet, Sylvia Plath whose poems are confessionals or Victoria Kankara’s Hymns and Hymens which are overtly erotic. Why are the emotions expressed in your work not personal like in Okigbo’s poetry but vicarious? HALIMA: OGEZI: Does that explain why you’re more at home with narrative poetry rather than lyrical poetry? HALIMA: OGEZI: You’re also a playwright and have published a play titled Honour Among Theives about disloyalty between two thieves. Did you consciously use the impotence of Danjuma as a leitmotif for the inadequacies of men generally? HALIMA: Certainly no. Not men generally but certain type of men. If I say men are generally impotent, that will label me a man-hater and I’m not a man-hater. The play is generally about role-playing, the social dislocations that occur when people are unable to adequately play their roles. The book is not really about men and women but social and cultural forces which prevent people from being honest to themselves and to one another. OGEZI: The feminist undertones cannot be written off in your play. Christiana’s act of taking in for her husband’s friend, Joe, is obviously the celebration of a new dawn for women where they refuse to be docile as the society would want them to be but rise up to take their destinies in their hands. Do you share that view? HALIMA: That’s a very interesting question because it bothers on several issues but I’d just mention just my motivation in creating Christiana as a character. I see her as an individual forced into an uncomfortable situation as a result of poverty and cultural norms and values. And the point I’m trying to make in this play is that morality is often relegated to a secondary position when people are in very, very difficult situations. I don’t think I’m the only Nigerian writer to hold such a view. Ben Okri’s characters are often forced into crimes and immorality as a result of their economic and social situations. But to talk of Christiana as a celebration of a new dawn for women, my perception is that it goes beyond the woman issue. I’m talking about an individual adopting strategies or rather unusual strategies in order to cope in a society that is not ready to give her own space. Everything seems to be against her – her birth, educational background, her family background and the Nigerian culture which demands that a wife must also be a mother. OGEZI: As a writer and a scholar, I’ve also noticed that you’re well at home with your dramaturgy in the use of mime, flashback, caricature, code-mixing in language, absurdist play-acting and alienation effect. HALIMA: OGEZI: The alienation effect in particular as popularized by the Marxist theatre of Bertolt Brecht and our Femi Osofisan, was also highly used in your play. Don’t you feel in a bid to make a piece of stage work highly theatrical, the Marxist playwright sometimes succeeds in killing the verisimilitude which is the whole essence of the theatre? HALIMA: OGEZI: What did you seek to achieve by the last scene of the play? To work out a pathos in the audience or hilarity? In my review of the play, I called it an indeterminate play – neither a tragedy nor a comedy. As the writer, do you subscribe to that assertion too? HALIMA: Certainly not. It’s not an indeterminate play. The ending for me is part of the crisis situation. Why will I end a play while the events are still being played out in daily life? For me, the crisis of characters such as Christiana, Danjuma and Joe, is that they’ll always be involved in police cases and I didn’t want a situation in that particular play where readers or the audience will think that the young woman’s problems have been solved. So, the tragedy for me in the play is that, unless society finds a place for a young, orphaned girl, there is always a possibility that her life will play itself out among undesirable characters. In short, what I’m trying to say is that, the tragedy is that Christiana’s tragedy continues. OGEZI: During a writers’ conference in 2007, E. E. Sule once put a question to the womenfolk which I intend to ask you now. When will you women stop telling the woman story, writing from the kitchen, to use Professor Charles Nnolim’s expression? HALIMA: I’m surprised that Dr. Sule feels that there is anything called the woman story. I thought that writing from different writers is a mosaic where different perspectives come into play to form a social convention. For instance, I believe in the Nigerian literary convention and within the Nigerian literary convention, there are men, women and youth writers. There are men who write about women, there are women who write about men, and there are men and women who write about children. Why should any critic or writer prescribe what other writers should write about? Besides, it’s a trend for certain critics to judge any work from a woman writer feminist or concerned with woman issue. So ultimately, when a woman publishes a work, the first thing those critics look out for is that her central character is female and she discusses issues from the female perspective. But these female characters are part of a bigger social milieu which some critics ignore. For instance, are we going to say that Chimamanda Adichie, Sefi Atta and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo are less concerned with fundamental issues which affect the human beings in Nigeria because most of their central characters are women? Therefore, talking about the woman issue is simplifying what women writers are concerned with. They’re concerned with social stability and if their perspective is from the female characters’ experiences, does it make it less relevant? In fact, one of the strongest writings I’ve read in recent times about the woman issue is by a male Nigerian writer, Abubakar Gimba’s Sacred Apple. OGEZI: You were in the USA for a writers’ conference in April, 2008. What was the conference all about? HALIMA: I actually went there for African Literature Association’s conference which took place in ……………………………..It was such a beautiful experience. I had the opportunity of meeting African writers and critics of African literature who have made a big impact on African literature, namely, Bernth Lindfors, Eustace Palmer, Helon Habila, Niyi Osundare, Remi Raji, Chika Unigwe, Helen Chukuma, and Professor Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. It was generally about African literature, the way forward, problems, critical perspectives and how to integrate African literature into the mainstream of World literature. OGEZI: Since the publication of your play, Honour Among Thieves in 2006, we’ve not had anything from you again. What’s happening? I mean, when do we expect any more work from your forge? HALIMA: In-sha-Allahu, this year. It’s a collection of short stories between seven and eight. Also, I’ve finished a full-length novel and it will be published, hopefully, a few months after the short story collection.

Halima Sekula: The Emergence of a Female Playwright

By Isaac Attah Ogezi That there is a sharp decline in playwriting and dramatic productions in Nigeria in the last two decades is an obvious fact. In the words of the critic and writer, E. E. Sule of Impotent Heavens fame, “drama is the Cinderella of modern Nigerian literature”. In his introduction to Camouflage: Best of Contemporary Writing from Nigeria (2006) edited by Nduka Otiono and Odo Diego Okenyodo, Otiono writes: “Clearly, the least patronized genre is drama – there is only one playlet in this volume! And there have been years when ANA could not award its annual Drama prize because of paucity of quality entries”. Delivering the keynote address at the Playwriting Workshop organized by the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) in collaboration with the National Theatre and Centre for Black Africa Arts and Civilization (CBAAC) at the University of Lagos, Lagos, on March 31, 2006, Professor Femi Osofisan openly lamented the dearth of dramatic productions in recent times when he said: “Plays and playwrights are too obviously in short supply. At every literary competition that has been organized over the past two decades at least, it is this area of creativity that has been deficient and problematic, because very few play scripts are submitted, and even these few ones are mostly of indifferent quality. Whereas prose fiction shows a more or less robust growth, and poems are proliferating like water hyacinths, plays do not seem to inspire an equal devotion or enthusiasm among our writers. Mention Ahmed Yerima, Stella Oyedepo, Oguntokun, Julie Okoh, Chima Uto, and Irene Salami, and you exhaust the list.” The inclusion of Ahmed Yerima in the above list is a glaring subterfuge to widen the list because Yerima is not a playwright of this generation. On the contrary, he rightly belongs to the second generation of Nigerian playwrights such as Femi Osofisan, Bode Sowande, late Sonny Oti, Sam Ukala, Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, Kalu Uka, late Zulu Sofola, Iyorwuese Hagher, and Tess Akaeke Onwueme. His first work, Three Plays in Transition, was published in 1977, almost three decades ago, during his undergraduate days at University of Ibadan, Ibadan. The recent literary competition organized by ANA on the stage adaptations of Wole Soyinka’s works (excluding his published plays) to mark the 20th anniversary of Soyinka’s Nobel Prize for Literature, attracted a meagre output of sixteen entries at the expiration of the deadline on 30th May, 2006. What a shame! Throw such challenge to our poets and prose-writers, and you will count entries in tens of thousands. The issue becomes more worrisome in the area of female playwrights of this generation. Mention Stella Oyedepo, Julie Okoh, Tracie Chima Utoh, Irene Salami, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and you exhaust the list. Little wonder then that the emergence of a new female playwright like Halima Sekula in the depleted fray deserves to be greeted with pomp and pageantry. Halima Sekula debuts into the world of the stage with her first published play, Honour Among Thieves (2006). Before the print production of the play, the present writer was privileged to witness the stage performance of it by the Nasarawa State University Student Troupe on the 28th July, 2006 before an excited audience. The enthusiastic responses and praises showered on it were quite gratifying for a new playwright on the scene. The play opens with the two friends, Danjuma and Joe, celebrating their conquest over their innocent victims. Through the use of mime, they tell us how they operate as professional pickpockets. However, they pledge to be loyal to themselves to the end. Danjuma seals this promise when he says: “I would never do that to you, you are my partner and my friend, I would never steal from you. There is honour even among thieves. Apart from my wife Christiana, you are my only true friend. My trusted one. I trust you that is why I go hunting with you. (pp. 7 and 8). And what better way to put this honour to test than through a woman? In the next scene, we meet Danjuma’s wife, Christiana, and her friend Bridget. Through a skilful use of Brechtian alienation effect, mime and a flashback-within-a-flashback, Sekula tells us how Christiana was abused as a little child by Aunty Afiniki. While her age-mates were in school, she was busy hawking to feed the family of Aunty Afiniki. In the process, she met Danjuma and ran away to live in his house. But there is a snag to this otherwise blissful marriage – Danjuma is impotent! While infertility is the ruse Baroka, the Lion, uses to trap Sidi, the Jewel, in Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel, in Sekula’s play as in J. P. Clark’s verse play, Song of a Goat, it is the root source of conflict that culminates into a full-scale tragedy. The difference between J. P. Clark’s play and Sekula’s is that while in the former a wife (Ebiere) commits incest with her husband’s younger brother Tonye, in the latter, it is with the husband’s closest friend and partner in crime. Apart from the theme of infertility, Sekula draws the attention of her audience and readers to the plight of the girl-child and how women politicians who parade themselves as feminists use her as a front to launch their political careers. The greatest strength of any good play lies in the masterful use of dialogue and action or movement and not mere themes alone. According to Charles R. Larson, “…. The dramatist Wole Soyinka, becomes famous among his own people (including those who cannot read) because a playwright need only depend upon the sounds of his words and his listener’s ears, while the writer of fiction must depend upon the printed page.” Sekula deserves to be commended for her brilliant use of dialogue. On page 12, she puts the following words into the mouth of her character Bridget: That is the great moment every man seems to wait for. To be told by a woman that the often watered garden has sprouted fruit, that his back did not ache in vain This is as ribald as Soyinka’s Sadiku in The Lion and the Jewel, when she celebrates the victory of women over men, thus: …It is you who run giddy while we stand still and watch, and draw your frail thread from you, slowly, till nothing is left but a runty old stick. I scotched Okiki, Sadiku’s unopened treasure-house demanded sacrifice, and Okiki came with his rusted key. Like a snake he came at me, like a rag he went back, a limp rag, smeared in shame…” (p. 32) On page 14, Sekula makes her characters Christiana and Bridget engage in the following lewd dialogue: BRIDGET: Are you saying…? Is Danjuma a mere horse in the photograph? Strong, glossy appearing ready to mount but…But…. CHRISTIANA: But quiet. But unmoving night after night, day after day loving me with words, with presents not once no, not a single time has Danjuma loved me with his manhood. The way your husband does I suppose. Also, the use of Hausa words such as “shege daniska” (p.4), “shegiya” (p. 17), “kai!” (p. 17) and a few others adds some local colour to the dialogue, thus fixing the locale of the story in a nameless northern city of Nigeria. Writing on the need for playwrights to fashion their own kind of English to reflect the socio-economic realities of their environments, Martin Esslin, a world-renowned critic of the Theatre of the Absurd, says: In that case there might be very strong arguments, for their concentrating on a realistic treatment of life of English-speaking Africans. This would enable them (the playwrights) to use an actual language, or different shades and idioms as spoken by different strata of that particular – and surely immensely important – segment of their society…. The playwrights concerned are faced with the task of evolving a new, truly African brand of English which will eventually be able to embody the emotions, customs and daily life of the people concerned as efficiently and beautifully as West Indian English expresses the character of the people who use it in daily life as well as in literature. The only problem a reader or critic will encounter with Sekula’s play is that it defies dramatic categorization. It is neither a comedy nor a tragedy nor a tragi-comedy. In fact, it is an indeterminate play. Similarly, Danjuma’s amateurish revenge on his friend Joe lacks the emotional intensity of Shakespeare’s Othello when he is tricked into believing that his wife Desdemona had an affair with Cassio. The ending of her play is more predictable and melodramatic than realistic, in consequence, robbing the work of the necessary pathos of a great tragedy. One can almost quote the entire comments of Martin Esslin on Clark’s Song of a Goat as also relevant to Sekula’s play. Esslin observes, and rightly to, that: I found Song of a Goat not quite convincing. The motivation of the tragedy, which is simply the husband’s inability to engender a child, is far too simple and unoriginal to support the weight of full-scale tragedy across the generations. Moreover, the wife’s seduction of the husband’s younger brother is also, at least for my admittedly quite differently conditioned feelings, far too clumsily straightforward. Instead of primeval tragedy (of which the second part of the diptych [The Masquerade] undoubtedly has the atmosphere) we are, in this crucial first part, merely left with a rather predictable incident from the pages of any popular newspaper. In a word, the ending of the instant work is as predictable as the films in our Nollywood industry. So long as our playwrights refuse to be original like our filmmakers, they deserve to lose their audience to the home-video industry, for a bad film is by far better than a bad play. At least in a bad film, the viewer can be treated to beautiful scenery, posh cars, soul-stirring soundtracks, and palatial houses, but do the playwrights have such resources in the stage? No. His two basic resources are the listener’s ears (dialogue) and a very good story. Also, there are a few typographical and grammatical errors such as “she stress ‘a’” (p. 12), “a podium in the front face the arranged chairs” (p. 20), “Her majestic excellence Chief…” (p. 20), “her stiff headgear extend…” (p. 21), “all these while I have “ (p. 41), “ he will loose his manhood” (p. 43), “jumps up as if beaten by an ant” (p. 45), “no a home” (p.50), “he lounges at her” (p. 51) and “He stares at her …then matches out” (p. 51). Be that at it may, this play marks the first cutting of Sekula’s teeth as a playwright and not yet her magnum opus. Playwriting is still like a virgin terrain in our literary landscape that needs to be explored. And the modern playwright who seeks to carve a niche for himself, must not tread the path of threadbare stories of our home-video industry. He must be very experimental in form and content if he must be relevant in an age of Nollywood.

The Downtrodden Female in Unoma Azuah’s Sky-High Flames

By Isaac Attah Ogezi ‘The secret of masterpieces lies in the concordance between the subject and the temperament of the author’ The above immortal words of the French writer and philosopher, Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880), become more relevant in our age where the school of Art for Art’s sake is obsolete, if not completely dead. Creative writing is not an exception, for if a writer must succeed at all in his creative career, he must write about the cause he fights for. In a word, writing is all about passion. It is the driving force for success in writing. And ‘ a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his sympathies’, to quote Willa Carther (1873 – 1947). It is a truism that a writer with capitalist sympathies can hardly produce a great work of art that will extol socialism which he detests with his very soul. The same can be said of a socialist writer. George Orwell, a spy-writer of the then Western Bloc, lampoons the utopianism and foibles inherent in Karl Marx’s communism when he published his masterpiece, Animal Farm (1945). This single work alone wrecked more havoc in the socialist camp in the mid-forties than any vituperative anti-socialist essay or propaganda. It is interesting to note that the Eastern Bloc is not without its left-wing warriors. Until the emergence of Bertolt Brecht, the definition of tragedy must encompass three basic ingredients – the hero must be a great man in the fictional society of the writer with an inborn tragic flaw or hubris or ‘Hamartia’ which leads to his fall from grace to grass enough to arouse the sympathies of the reader or audience. There must be a purgation of emotions to result in catharsis before a work of art could be classed as a tragedy – Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, to mention but a few of the most glaring. This famous Aristotelian concept of tragedy received the greatest blow when Brecht proved to the whole wide world with his two classics, The Good Woman of Setzuan and The Caucacian Chalk Circle that the little man, the nondescript peasant in the society could also be made a subject of great tragedies. He brought firebrand Marxism to the modern stage with unprecedented success. While Marxism deals with the downtrodden in a class-segregated society, feminism can be said to be an offshoot of Marxism in that it deals with the exploited, albeit the female gender. It has equally produced champions such as the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (The Doll’s House), novelist Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Kate Chopin, Flora Nwapa, Femi Osofisan (with his now famous coinage, ‘foremothers!’), Zulu Sofola, Zaynab Alkali, Ifeoma Okoye and very recently Unoma Azuah with her novel, Sky-High Flames. Before the emergence of Flora Nwapa in the late sixties, the Nigerian literary world was male-dominated like our sexist society. The few female characters in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are lifeless beings, mere walking shadows like the blacks in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Irked by this male chauvinism of our male writers, Nwapa responded by showing how women could also be made great heroines of serious literature with her ground-breaking novels, viz: Efuru, Idu and One is Enough. Zulu Sofola took up the fight to the theatre with her A Sweet Trap, Zaynab Alkali fired her canon from the North with her The Stillborn and The Descendants (2005), Ifeoma Okoye with her Behind the Clouds (even men too could be impotent, you know!), the list is endless. With Unoma Azuah’s Sky-High Flames, it is obvious that the gender war is not yet over until it is over, with victory for women. For there can never be peace when violence is daily committed against our women, when our society denies the girl-child equality with her male counterpart. No, we are not yet done with this sporadic stuttering of guns from the women’s camp! Told in the first-person narrative technique, a technique well noted for its immediacy and potency, Azuah’s Sky-High Flames is a poignant story of a little girl called Ofunne, who is on the threshold of maturity. The novel opens with the heroine-narrator returning from the Oshimili River. She tells us of her father who has two wives – her mother and the one he inherited from his father. To show her naivety, she mentions this fact as a usual thing that happens in her community without strong vilification. However, right from the outset, she makes no secret of her dream to acquire Western education when she says: ‘But for whatever reason my parents were the way they were, I couldn’t wait to leave home and attend high school. I wanted to be well educated with a high school certificate. I wanted to become a teacher and get married to the man of my dreams. Then my life would take the course I wanted it to to take.’(p. 1) Beautiful dreams those were like Alkali’s Li until reality aborts her dreams, leaving her with stillborns. The society gratuitously allows Ofunne to have a taste of high school education only to cut it abruptly in the middle. Her marriage is hastily conducted in proxy to a man who fulfils the stereotype of the male character in women’s prose-fiction. The male ogre with lies as his stock-in-trade, women his Achilles’ heel; simply an idiotic being not worthy of the woman he marries. As if this is not enough, Azuah further afflicts Oko Okolo with syphilis like Dozie’s impotence in Okoye’s Behind the Clouds. At the end of the novel, Azuah makes her heroine take a feminist stand in the farce of a marriage she is coerced into by opting out. What strikes the reader of this novel most is the sophisticated simplicity of the language partly because of the age and education of the child-narrator and Azuah’s familiarization with the syntax ad semantics of the language she teaches at Lane College, Jackson, Tennessee, USA. Sparse, poetic and evocative, her language truly belongs to the most Standard English devoid of clichés and what people call Nigerian English. This is no doubt a rare achievement in modern Nigerian fiction that deserves all the laurels the work is currently garnering internationally. Apart from the foregoing, Sky-High Flames possesses all the disturbing qualities of a first novel – weak characterization, melodramatic plot, unrealistic conflict resolution, and one or two typographical errors. The first deficiency a reader-critic will notice is the almost lifeless characters that people Azuah’s fictional world. Flat or stock characters that are reactionary to the cause-effect movement of the plot. Our heroine Ofunne still sees the world from a child’s eyes without any development in her language like Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations. Worse still, her husband Oko Okolo, like most male anti-heroes of feminist writings, is a devil without a single redeeming feature. All the characters speak good English even truck-driver Zani and his wife Mama Abu in Kaduna. Their creator never makes any attempt to make them real for us. Fortunately, one can readily come to her defence by reeling out names of many of our writers in the Diaspora who are alienated from their roots after a brief spell in Europe and America. Ben Okri wrote his Booker-Award winning The Famished Road without infusing any Pidgin English nor proverbs. Any European writer could as well write such an over-long novel and cash in on the Abiku-Obanje world of magical realism. In the area of melodramatic plot, what is said here could equally be referring to almost all the prose writers of this generation. The ability to tell a good story is the weakest points of the writers of our time. The iron determination and literary language are there but the same cannot be said of the talents for telling good stories. And yet the average Nigerian writer is so vainglorious that he dismisses our home video industry with a snobbish wave of his hand for what he cannot do better! There is no gainsaying the fact that before the publication of Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus the Nigerian prose-fiction was full of many oaks and many already sagging (apologies to Femi Osofican). Any wonder why our short stories now flourish from abroad? Our best short story writers such as Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, Sefi Atta, Ike Ikonta, Segun Afolabi, David Njoku and now Helon Habila are all based in Europe and America. To cite a few examples of poor handling of plot in Azuah’s novel, an extract will speak volumes of this deficiency. The fighting scene at the public tap is described as follows: ‘ I was so infuriated. I pushed him. Why would I be the one to wait for as long as I did and then have some unruly boy thrust himself right in front of me? He didn’t even beg. The people behind me yelled at him to get out of my face and join the line. But he pushed me so hard that I fell on my buttocks. He laughed and went to the end of the line. I ran after him, intending to leave some scratches on his face, but Oko had already grabbed him by the neck, hurled him to the ground and landed a couple of punches on his stomach. He yelped and they scuffled for a while, raising dust. The young man struggled to lift his weight off the ground, but Oko held him down…’(p. 102) Azuah could have done better than that. Also, the scenes at the pigsty (pp 63-64) and the sudden, ghost-like appearance of her husband at the park when she attempts to run away from home (pp. 115-116) are over-exaggerated for the reader to swallow with a ton of salt. What about the unrealistic conflict resolution in the story? Yes, the introduction of conflicts, complications and denouement are not the exclusive preserve of dramaturgy but also prose-fiction. A story must be properly ended before it can lay claim to be a good one. The early part of Azuah’s story is so delightful when Ofunne goes to the Girls’ Training College in Enugu, the author’s version of a boys’ school in Chukwuemeka Ike’s Bottled Leopard. This world of learning is so peaceful and serene until it is shattered by her sudden withdrawal to be married off in her absence to Oko. From here the story assumes a bizarre, almost uncoordinated form until the unrealistic climax. In fact, some stories are better told when conflicts are not introduced at all. When a writer cannot resolve conflicts satisfactorily, it is advisable he writes plotless stories that challenge the reader to appreciate the flowery language, the psychology of his characters and the powerful description of situations other than stories themselves. After all, some of the best short stories in the world are plotless. The real conflict in Azuah’s work is the near-impotence of Oko as a result of his syphilis as in Okoye’s Behind the Clouds. Here Azuah tells us very little about syphilis. Is it enough to make a woman give birth to a stillborn? Is it enough for a woman to call it quits with her man? But the story must end in a radical feminist way that Alkali’s The Stillborn did not, thus a forced ending. The few typographical errors can only be discussed in passing since they are so few and negligible. The quality of the printing is of the highest order in any part of the world. In short, the shock of stumbling over a few errors is as appalling as finding an Ajegunle-like Harlem in the heart of New York City. They are as follows: ‘…didn’t act knowledge my greetings’ (p. 104), ‘that he would practice some more after he feed’ (p.109), ‘His small muscles were beginning to tout’ (p.145), etc. Also, almost all the characters use the expression ‘when I’m done’ so much that it can be said that there is no speech pattern for each character – Ofunne (pp133, 134, 137), Oko (p. 133), Mama Abu, Mama Oko (pp 136 and 137), Sister Dolan, etc. This becomes so jarring on the reader’s nerves for its monotony. Be that at it may, Azuah deserves our commendation for mustering up the courage to write a full-length novel after several years of writing short stories and poetry. Her poems are so good that one begins to feel she is specially cut out to be a poet and not a novelist. However, such a conclusion would be rather hasty, as only time will tell. If she makes a deliberate effort to avoid the obvious pitfalls of her first novel, the chances are that she could still write the invisible African novel of our gene

The Conspiracy of Silence in Okey Ndibe’s Arrow of Arrow

By Isaac Attah Ogezi Writing like any other form of communication is a two-way traffic – between the writer and his reader. I prefer to call creative writing an intimate dialogue between the writer and his reader. It is a deliberate kind of writing where the writer exerts so much effort in the use of language to clothe his beautiful plots. As an entertainer, the writer is placed in a tricky situation like a stand-up comedian; he must at all times strive to hold his audience-reader spellbound or else suffer a humiliating boo in lieu of a standing ovation. Diverse as the society perceives who a writer is, to me he is first and foremost an entertainer albeit of the highbrow or elitist class since his audience in a Third World country like ours is the tiny literate class. After this primary function of a writer in his society, other appellations may follow such as a social reformer, critic, Marxist, etc., etc. A social critic, yes, but he must not relegate the entertainment value of his craft to mere social criticism or preachments otherwise his works become mere pamphlets gathering dust in the libraries. Creative writing is a serious dialogue the writer engages with his reader. It can only be memorable like a good poem only if it is entertaining. It is not the object of this article to discuss what makes a work of art entertaining. Suffice it to say that it is a conglomerate of several ingredients which space will not permit an extensive discourse. Of late, the present writer has had such an intimate dialogue with the novelist Okey Ndibe. It is entertaining, educative and memorable enough to deserve a retelling. I finished Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain within two nights. As I devoured it, my mind in its characteristically mischievous way, was busy fishing out novels that share some common ground with Ndibe’s in terms of thematic pre-occupation and plot. My lean harvest is two novels by his countrymen, which I shall briefly discuss. Cyprian Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana’s Daughter (1986) tells of Liza Nene Papadopoulous, a lawyer, who in spite of her attainment in life, feels unfulfilled. Who is her mother? This question haunts Liza like Banquo’s ghost. In a quest to find her mother, the story unfolds in the now famous Ekwensian unexpected twists and intrigues until she finally meets her biological mother Jagua Nana. Where we cannot fault the theme of this book, the plot is highly unrealistic to the point of ludicrousness. After the last page, the reader feels cheated for having been swindled by the writer and flings the book away. One wonders why a writer of Ekwensi’s class would condescend to write a shoddy work like this. A writer who is fondly called the great chronicler of city life. Indeed, Jagua Nana’s Daughter is a dismal failure as a novel, unworthy to be a sequel to the writer’s best-selling controversial Jagua Nana. Chukwuemeka Ike’s Conspiracy of Silence (2001) though published a year later after Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000), the similarity of themes of these two novels calls for a comparison. The former centres on Dr. Nwanneka Ofuma, a Consultant Paediatrician who feels some emptiness in her life ever since the shattering discovery that the woman she calls mother is not really her true mother but her supposed Auntie Ukamaka! To worsen the situation, her mother refuses to unveil who her biological father is. The plot attains its climax when, after the death of her uncle Barrister James Ikenna Ofuma, the oppressive walls of silence finally crumble and the mother weepingly tells her of the fantastic story of incest she had with her late brother (Barrister James) which resulted in the conception of the major character. Like Odewale in Ola Romiti’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, Dr. Nnwanneka’s world is shattered and she flees abroad out of shame. Ike’s powerful theme in this novel is the crime the society commits by keeping silent in the face of barbaric traditions that encourage fatherlessness. He accuses the government and religious bodies for paying lip-service instead of open admonition. Unfortunately, his fervent messianic posture has always killed the artistry of his works. In every page of the book, he flaunts his readers with his theme like an obsequious servant trying to please his masters! The novel reads more of an essay that would grace a newspaper than a serious literary work of art. Unlike Ekwensi, Ike’s story is flawed with heavily clichéd English. It is a collection of worn-out idioms any lazy SSCE student of our secondary school would really cherish! Also, Ike disappoints his readers with the melodramatic way the story ends just like a discarded story Helon Habila would write for Hints magazine three years ago. It is a dismal failure like Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana’s Daughter. After laboriously going through these two bad novels, the reader’s spirits get uplifted when he encounters Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain. Told in racy and graceful prose, Ndibe’s first novel dwells also on the theme of silence and its concomitant effect. He tells us of a professional journalist Femi Adero who feels like an outcast since the disturbing discovery that the couple he calls parents are only his foster-parents. Then who are his parents? Like Odewale, he is hell-bent on unearthing this mystery surrounding his birth. The conspiracy of silence of his foster-parents is stifling and he has to look elsewhere for an answer. It does not matter if his background is shameful. Fate takes him to B. Beach on a New Year Day where a woman is drowned. The suspect is one mad man called Bukuru who is arraigned before a court on a multiple charge of murder, rape, etc. His trial arouses widespread interest which Femi fearlessly covers for his paper. This singular act of chivalry earns him an invitation to the prison by Bukuru. The reader knows later that it is the call of blood. Who says that blood is not thicker than water? Well, from here the story unfolds in a breathtaking speed and the reader is shocked to realize that Ogugua alias Bukuru, one-time journalist, is Femi’s cowardly father. Apart from the skilful handling of the story, the use of contrast makes the work a masterpiece. The father Ogugua (Bukuru) is a class-conscious man who is afraid of declaring his love for a prostitute like Iyese nor is he bold enough to identify himself as the father of her child Femi. His love for his integrity and pride is more pronounced when he goes to her place in the night only to discover her dead – brutally murdered. The selfish man in him makes him sneak away and pretends shock when he is later intimated of her death by Violet. The reader feels disappointed in him again when he could not go after her killer. All he does as a coward is to scurry into hiding when he hears that her killer Major Palat Bello is the new Head of State of Madia. His neurotic fear further graduates to a state of madness. His son Femi contrasts sharply with him in everything so much that the shame of discovery leads the father to kill himself like Elesin when his son Olunde offers himself to die in place of his father in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman (1975). It is also a political novel but the political theme is played to the background with such a consummate skill that only an expert like Ndibe could attempt successfully. In the whole range of African fiction, the only novel that can be compared to Arrows of Rain in terms of the complex handling of plot is Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Petals of Blood. After going through these two great novels, the reader pauses to wonder at the beauty of imagination. His is left with only one conclusion, to wit, that the two writers are great thinkers, for only great thinkers can weave such marvelous stories without leaving any strands unstitched. However, like any other great novel, Ndibe’s novel is not without its Achilles’ heels. For example, the treatment of Iyese alias Emilia in the hands of Major Isa Palat Bello is too exaggerated to be believed. No reader can be convinced that a man could sleep with a woman after stabbing her vagina with a dagger! (p. 166) Haba, Ndibe, which kin’ countrey dis thin’ fit happen, eh? Ndibe carries this exaggeration to the trial of Bukuru at the early chapters of the book. In fact, the entire trial is a farce and the major weakness in the work. It shows the writer’s little acquaintance with the criminal justice system of not only Africa but the world legal system! Of course, writers have the license to tamper with realities to suit their creative endeavours but it must be kept to the minimum if they must be taken seriously by their readers. Who ever hears of a person standing trial for a capital offence such as murder being allowed to defend himself? As if that is not enough, the lawyers in the trial scene raise unnecessary objections! The last straw in this exaggeration is the unprofessional conduct of Justice Kayode when Bukuru claims that General Isa Palat Bello once raped Iyese. (p.39). In sustaining the objection of the junior prosecutor, the Judge brings down “his gavel with deafening force” and says “Order! I rule the accused in contempt!” (p.39). A person who is standing trial for murder can never be cited for contempt. The worst a judge can do in such a circumstance if the accused is not fit and proper to be tried is to be remanded at the prison. Anything contrary to this is tantamount to the judge descending into the arena of conflicts, which is a good ground for appeal. Not even during Abacha’s despotism could there be judges like Justice Kayode in Ndibe’s novel. If his portrayal of Justice Kayode is for the purpose of satire, then it fails lamentably. It is important to note that court scenes have always fascinated novelists from time immemorial. Unfortunately, only a negligible few take their time to really research into the inner workings of the law like Isidore Okepwho’s The Last Duty, Sidney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels and The Other Side of Midnight, John Grisham’s legal thrillers and even a school boys’ play like D. Olu Olugoke’s The Incorruptible Judge which succeed where Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain and Wale Okediran’s Dreams Die at Twilight fail woefully. It is suggested that before a novelist attempts to write a paragraph on a specialized field such as law or medicine, he should try as much as possible to research or consult experts in the field who may be willing to share their knowledge. The third apparent lacuna in Ndibe’s novel is the narrative style. Where one cannot fault the highly poetic language employed, one wonders why Bukuru’s narrative style and Femi’s, the narrator, are the same. There is no gainsaying the fact that writing is like fingerprints and no two persons can write or speak the same. Apart from the usual hints by the writer to signpost where another narrator takes over from the other, the linguistic level of the two narrators are virtually the same. The only writer again who seems conscious of the need to make each character in a work of fiction speak in a unique style in Nigerian fiction is Isidore Okepwho in his The Last Duty, already quoted above. In defence of Ndibe, one can say that this failure is common to most novelists who seem to be writers in a hurry! In both Okediran’s Dreams Die at Twilight and Ike’s Conspiracy of Silence, no character has distinct speech patterns. They all speak the English of the writer! Could it be that only our playwrights can execute this seemingly difficult art of dialogue? Perhaps. Despite these few flaws, Ndibe is a very powerful voice among the new generation of Nigerian writers. His first novel Arrows of Rain paves the way for the new direction of modern Nigerian fiction. One regrets that copies of this beautiful book are not available in our bookshops. For Ndibe is a unique stylist who deserves not only to be read for pleasure but studied at our various universities and polytechnics.

A Rising Voice From The North: A Review Of E. E. Sule’s Impotent Heavens

By Isaac Attah Ogezi The short story sub-genre is no doubt the most neglected aspect of prose-fiction in Nigerian literature. Neglected by its self-professed practitioners, readers and the critics, it toddles behind the novel and novella. To the average Nigerian writer, the short story is an all-comers’ field like poetry; the stepping stone for the apprentice writer before attempting the more ‘serious” full-length novel. It does not require so much talents. No, not at all. All the new entrant to the revered world of letters need do is think up a story short enough to occupy a page or two, scribble it in a hurry, and a short story, nay, a writer is born. Click of glasses and cheers! Consequently, the standard of short stories that litter our national dailies leaves much to be desired. Unfortunately, this ugly scenario stemmed from our first generation writers. Yes, our first generation writers are equally guilty of the fate of the short story today. In their days, the short story was a neglected field; a last resort when an established novelist encountered the writer’s block or when a writer was vainglorious enough to exhibit his versatility. Chinua Achebe in his apprenticeship days at the University of Ibadan tried his hand at the short story before he eventually graduated to full-length novel writing. During the Nigerian civil war, he turned his talents again to the jilted short story with little success as his Girls at War is a far cry from the real Achebe of Things Fall Apart fame. The same can be said of Cyprian Ekwensi, whose Restless City and Christmas Gold and Lokotown and Others Stories fall grossly below expectations. It is the same sad story for our second generation writers. Apart from Ken Saro Wiwa’s A Forest of Flowers, which may earn a grudging pass work without being spectacular, the second generation writers have little or next to nothing to show in terms of short stories. Fetus Iyayi’s Awaiting Court-martial, Abubakar Gimba’s no-book A Toast in the Cemetery, Benue ANA’s hurriedly published Beyond Gold, all speak volumes of the kind of lamentable stuff that we call short stories. Needles to say, Nigeria is yet to produce short story craftsmen of the likes of South African Nadine Gordimer, Alex La Guma, late Richard Rive and Ezekiel Mphahlele. In spite of a deluge of low-quality works in the name of short stories, one cannot fail to notice some promising writers of the new generation who take this sub-genre as seriously as it deserves, viz: Helon Habila, Maik Nwosu, David Njoku, Toyin Adewale, Dul Johnson, Maria Ajima and very recently, E.E Sule, a rising voice from the North. Admittedly, it is quite unusual to discuss the work of a new writer with so much emphasis on the part of the country where he hails from. However, this can be mitigated by the obvious fact that the North is comparatively silent such that any entrance of a new arrival is greeted with a lot of euphoria, especially if such a new writer shows some promise as E.E Sule. Egya Emmanuel Sule makes his maiden appearance on the literary scene with his Impotent Heavens, a collection of sixteen well-crafted stories, unevenly divided into two parts – the gloomy and the humorous. The first part comprises ten harrowing stories that are bound to leave the reader with nightmarish effect. It opens with the ironically titled “Peace Keepers”, where the writer narrates with great sympathy albeit without inhibitions the experience of a family during the Nigerian civil war. Otewo, the ten-year-old child-hero, dreams of becoming a soldier when he grows up because soldiers are “so lively, so jovial as though they have no problems” (p.7). Our sensitive child-hero is carried away by the carefree merriment of the federal soldiers in public, and the fear they inspire on the defenseless villagers. Unfortunately, this innocent dream is no sooner conceived than aborted when his “heroes” rape his mother before his eyes. The feeling of insecurity in life is heightened when peace keepers turn predators. Where else can one turn to? Set in the civil war days, this story is also very relevant in our so- called peacetime where our soldiers and the police mount check-points at every kilometer of our roads to extort bribes from motorists, armed robbers on the highway, busy collecting ransoms from their victims. If one finds “Peace Keepers” haunting and disturbing, wait until you read the title story “Impotent Heavens” and you will weep. To the puritan reader, after reading this blood-chilling story, he is bound to do either of two things – fling the book away or burn it ritualistically as a priest was reported to have burnt Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. But that will not help matter for such a hypocritical reader who detests the bitter truth of the heart of man with passion, for what Sule has so well succeeded in doing in this great story is turn on the torchlight of truth, the unswerving truth, on the heart of darkness that is man and bid us see our real selves; the dark, lady-Macbeth heart of man that is inherently evil. And the story begins…. Once upon a time, there lived two good neighbors of different religious faiths in the commercial city of Kano. Their cordiality was also extended to their children, Razak and Samuel alias Hardy, who were very close classmates. Hardy, as narrated by Razak in the first person narrative, was a precocious orphan on the paternal side, a visionary cripple whose life’s dream was to put an end to violence by eliminating the monster called weaponry which, in his words, “is an anti-human technology monster that swallows human beings now and then” (p.12). As an Arts student, he still topped his class in maths after all, “maths is a bunch of artistry” (p.16). These sterling qualities endeared him to Razak who came to idolize him so much. Then something happened that was to test the depths of their parents’ good neighborliness. Hardy’s widowed professor mother was away when that mad killing in the unholy name of religion started in Kano. Alone at home, a confused Hardy lacked what to do. Should he run outside for refuge? No, not with those crutches that he propped his deformed body on. The timely rescue of his friend Razak who invited Hardy over to their house, saved the situation. But for the meantime. Unfortunately, the duo had reckoned without Razak’s fanatical father Alhaji Bako, who came home raving on how the Christians killed his Muslim brothers and sisters, and destroyed the central mosque, only to discover in his own house his Christian neighbor’s crippled child! What a great dilemma indeed between the boy’s life and the Islamic injunction to kill “kafiri” during war and the concomitant rewards in paradise! Alhaji Bako had no difficulty in choosing the latter option because “in my religion, I don’t deal with things that are human; but things that are of Allah” (p.27). To buttress his argument, he asserted that “It is not possible for me to hide a Kafiri in my house. By Allah, it means I’m a Kafiri” (p. 25). In spite of his wife, Hajiya Binta’s tears of womanhood and pleas, he reiterated “No, we can’t allow him live when ours are dead!” (p.25). With an air of finality, he made straight away for Razak’s room and mercilessly butchered Hardy, his son’s bosom friend, to death, earning for himself like Okonkwo, his son’s mortal hatred. The beauty of this story lies not only in the beautiful plot and the highly poetic language but more predominantly in the skillful handling of the diverse narrative techniques, switching swiftly from the first person to the omniscient technique with equal dexterity. More so, the treatment of his characters is comparable to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Just like Shakespeare’s King Hamlet and Ophelia are masterfully treated with some touch of sympathy, Sule’s characters invoke in the readers some heart-felt sympathies; one feels that despite the cruelty of Alhaji Bako, he is a pitiable victim of his religion, a prey caught in the spiderweb of fanaticism. As the religious crises in both Kaduna and Jos show, Alhaji Bako is we: man at his most cruel. And we cannot vindicate ourselves. Never! Other stories of interest include “My Fasting Period”, which dwells on religious hypocrisy, the timeless theme of appearance versus reality and the faultless “Doctor Apu”, an excellent story centered on man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. The second part comprises six stories, which act as a comic relief from the gothic horror of the first part. It shows us the humorous side of the writer, who can also spin a hilarious tale, especially as evident in his most successful satire, “At a Poetry Reading.” Thematically, Sule is primarily concerned about the timeless, never-changing nature of man: his bestiality, hypocrisy, fear, pride, vaulting ambition, love etc. He is, first and foremost, a humanist. In most of the stories in his collection, he unsparingly indicts his society on the kind of adults it is producing when its children are daily traumatized. As a child’s rights activist, he makes the plight of children his focal point and draws our attention to it. Worried over all these upheavals in his society, his pessimism drifts towards atheism. In other words, Sule as a writer doubts at all if there is a Supreme Being, a God who looks on unconcernedly at the evil wrought in our Adam-and-Eve earth without any divine intervention. To quote him, “even heavens, impotent, stared at the hideous dramas of a purposeful religionist” (p.30). In almost all the stories in the first part, the writer seems to be yearning for the seemingly elusive answer to the timeless question: “Is there a God in heaven?” If the answer is in the affirmative, why are all these things happening to our world, to us, unintervened? Are we cursed? This atheistic question of the pessimist resounds pointedly to us Nigerians. Given our uncountable number of churches and mosques, we are still the most corrupt country in the whole world! Ours is a land of Sodom and Gomorrah where it makes no difference whether the military are in power or democracy except in the nomenclature. Indeed, we have every cause to bemoan our tragedy because our heavens are impotent otherwise things would not have been going this way. Ah, woe is we! However, what obviously robs some of these stories the hard-boiled realism one notices in Sule is the forced didacticism, the traditional triumph-of-good-over-evil ending that is the graveyard of our literature and films today. For a writer with so much guts like Iyayi, the ending of “Impotent Heavens” is not only improbable but also highly objectionable. How many Alhaji Bakos does nemesis always catch up with today? What price did Okonkwo have to pay for matcheting Ikemefuna who called him father? Of course, he was estranged from his son’s love like Alhaji Bako but was never visited with any malady by Achebe. Another question begging for an answer is why did a tough writer like Sule have to end his great story in so patronizing a way? Was he afraid it could turn out to be another Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and a “fatwa” declared on his head by the Muslims? If that is the case, then he has marred his would-have-been very, very great story because even for the average Muslim reader, the Qur’an is misinterpreted by Mallam Aminu in a bid to pacify the readers. The same thing applies to stories like “Village Mystery” and “From Purgatory” in this collection. A lesson must be learnt from this. When a writer seeks obsequiously to please his savage society, the insensitive establishment like ours, that is the beginning of his ruination. The writer owes his society the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, even if it may cost him his dear life. In the past, the appellation of the “poet” was the generic term for a creative writer. And the maxim is “The poet never lies.” And writing is a sacred duty, a religious duty the writer ipso facto owes his society. The true writer, in a word, must be as steadfast as Ezeulu and as uncompromising as Socrates. If he is forced to drink hemlock out of the ignorance of his generation today, he will certainly be celebrated as a martyr tomorrow and for the generations to come. Be that as it may, Sule is an important arrival on the literary landscape from the North who deserves to be read not because of the part of the country he hails from but because he has so many crucial things to say and knows so well how to say them without mincing words. As we welcome Sule to the sacred clan of men of letters with this collection, let us stay put, seat-belt fastened as we expect more and more from his arsenal.

Theatre Adaptations and the Nigerian Experience: An Examination of Osofisan’s Another Raft and Clark’s The Raft

By Isaac Attah Ogezi From time immemorial, artistes have always found the works of their fellow artistes dead or alive fascinating. This fascination sometimes can be so strong that such an artiste may not be able to resist the temptation to adapt such works with a view to imposing his vision on the works or to bring them to the tastes of his audience especially where the original works are of a different age or environment. The writer or playwright is not an exception in this kind of influence that is often translated to reworking an existing work. For the purpose of this discourse, adaptation1 can be viewed as making suitable of existing plays by playwright for new surroundings or audience for a greater appeal. In other words, audience relevance or bringing such plays to the tastes and experiences of the audience is of paramount importance in an adaptation. Theatre adaptations are not unique to Nigerian playwrights alone. Great world playwrights like Sophocles, Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Bernard Shaw and Eugene O’Neil have used the plots and themes of other playwrights to much acclaim. On the home front, we have adaptations such as Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rites and Opera Wonyosi (a composite adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera and Brecht’s own adaptation of Gay, The Threepenny Opera), Rotimi’s The Gods are Not to Blame, Wale Ogunyemi’s Everyman (based on the anonymous, ancient morality play of the same title) and Osofisan’s Who is Afraid of Solarin? (based on Gogol’s The Government Inspector but with the adapted title of Edward Albee’s play, Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to mention a few of the most prominent. However, in this work, Osofisan’s Another Raft shall be examined vis-à-vis J. P. Clark’s earlier play, The Raft, with a view to highlighting the successes or otherwise of the later work, the entertainment values, audience relevance, the imposition of the adapting playwright’s personal vision and adherence to aesthetic rules and principles of adaptation. The Compressionist Techniques in both Clark’s The Raft and Osofisan’s Another Raft: In Another Raft, Osofisan continues with the compressionist techniques adopted by J. P. Clark in The Raft to tell the story of a nation adrift on the sea of history right up to the era of military coups de’tat. It chronicles theatrically2 “the troubled situation of our newly-independent nation.” A nation which has experienced so many events since its independence enough to take it on the brink of sinking only to be miraculously kept afloat. After several decades, these storms have not abetted nor have the inmates been able to steer the ship of nation out of the fog. To avert this, the Ifa Priest, Orousi, is summoned and his verdict is that the ancient rites of collective cleansing must be revived. A carrier must be led down the Osa River, to the most ancient shrine of the Water Goddess, Yemosa, who is abandoned. This expedition is embarked upon by the Ifa Priest, Orousi, the old Priest of Yemosa, Omitoogun, who alone could locate the shrine, two boatmen, Waje and Oge, Lanusen, Prince of the palace, Chief Euroola, the Abore title-holder, principal Priest of Rituals, Reore, the reigning Farmer King, Gbebe and the carrier (Agunrin). Just like Clark’s The Raft, these nine characters aboard a raft experience a lot of sea mishaps, challenges and untold sufferings. First, the moorings are torn and the raft is adrift, with the paddles lost. Second, the endless bickerings amongst the inmates could not help matter, culminating in the death of the old Priest of Yemosa, Omitoogun, killed by his own son, Gbebe. Third, in the course of these inner rumblings, the carrier, Agunrin, throws his ritual gown to reveal a military officer’s uniform, and takes the raft adrift hostage. Fourth, the raft is wrenched into two by a tempest, with one part carrying off Prince Lanusen and Ekuroola. The chief boatman, Waje, and Agunrin dive into the water to rescue the duo only to be consumed along with them by the sharks, leaving only Orousi, Gbebe, Reore and Oge behind on the half-raft. Lastly, the guilt-ridden Gbebe who killed his father, sunk in despair, plunges down into the water to meet the same fate as the others, in the belly of sharks. In this confusion and uncertainty of a nation, the play ends in an optimistic note and with a clarion call that man must not resign his fate to the gods who “are a nuisance to man”3 but arise to take his fate in his hands. With these determination, insights and co-operation, the sunk raft is rowed back to the sea. In this adaptation, Osofisan has fully Nigerianized the original play to reflect the socio-political history of Nigeria, unlike Clark’s, though set in Nigeria with Nigerian characters, the thematic preoccupation is more universal, fixing man in a state that is beyond him, to which he cannot contend with without reliance on his fellow men. To the great drama critic, Martin Esslin, in The Raft, Clark attempts a very ambitious objective, with4 “the raft as an image of human life and man’s dependence on his fellow men and sheer chance – is very boldly and imaginatively pursued.” Osofisan, on the other hand, expands his focus beyond the fate of a single nation to the overall fate of the black world lost in the sea of history. As he put it into the mouth of his character, Gbebe5, “Each of you is a nation of Africa, each of you is the black race, each is the son of a shark, to be eaten by other sharks.” Earlier in the play, Gbebe laments that6: “… we are the only race of animals with an insatiable appetite for the children of our own flesh. Black men killing black, feeding on black. For ever and ever, black men always slaughtering other black men.” The military incursion into the political life of most African nations including Nigeria is well satirized when the supposed carrier, Agunrin, suddenly arises to intervene in the fracas amongst the civilian inmates, throwing his ritual gown to reveal a military officer’s uniform. We see how the politicians and the soldiers point accusing fingers at each other for the woes of the continent as aptly and philosophically stated by the character Gbebe7: “You’re a soldier. You accuse the politicians and the Chiefs of exploiting the people, and leading us to damnation. But what of you, sir? What else do you do except milk the land?” Osofisan’s Personal Vision of Optimism in Another Raft: One great area of divergence between Osofisan’s play and his elder compatriot’s is the former’s vision of optimism in place of the gloom of the latter. In The Raft, the tragedy of the two woodsmen left behind on the raft is complete and irredeemable and is captured in the two characters’ desperation and cry as follows8: KENGIBE: Shout, shout, Ibobo, let’s shout To the world – we woodsmen lost in the bush. IBOBO: We’re adrift, adrift and lost. Ee-ee-ee! KENGIBE: Shout, Ibobo, shout! The tragedy is so complete and irredeemable that the characters cannot even see each other because of the fog that has come upon them. It is indeed a pathetic end without any glimmer of hope nor any semblance of light at the end of the tunnel. Osofisan appears not to be pleased with such catastrophic ending and does not want to prophesy such a gloomy end for his country or any country in Africa, thence comes his happy ending in the usual character of tragi-comedies. The vision of optimism is well-captured by Oge when he encourages the others9: “Make we no surrender! De sea, we fit beat am! We fit fight de sea and win am! Come on!” Osofisan carries this vision further when he suggests the way out for a country like Nigeria, saddled with a multiplicity of ethnic groups and the concomitant leadership tussle. He tells the story of a king who had three sons all born on the same day, endowed with unique supernatural strengths reflective in their names: See-Far, Fly-Fast and Hear-At-Once. When the problem of which of them was to succeed their ailing father cropped up, the remaining three characters on the raft (Reore, Orousi and Oge) are unanimous that it must be all of them. In other words, Osofisan seems to advocate that the solution to Nigeria’s democracy is not the arrogation of power to one ethnic group or region but to all the ethnic groups or regions in a rather equitable sharing of power. This deviation from Clark’s irredeemable doom, forms the unique personal vision of Osofisan in this play. According to the scholar, Ahmed Yerima10: It is the playwright’s responsibility which allows the playwright impose a vision on old tales or original versions of plays … In adaptation, the theme is the first aspect of the play which the adapting playwright can infuse his own vision. The playwright adapting the play, must decide the extent to which he will infuse his own vision. He must decide the extent to which he is prepared to tamper or modify the original theme before actually starting to adapt. In this regard, Osofisan can be commended for compliance without dampening the entertainment value of his play. Yerima goes further to state that11: “… the primary function of adapting a play is to either update the entertainment values of the play, or to make the play more socially entertaining. Either way, entertainment is the main goal of the playwright.” Osofisan’s Multi-layered Language and Clark’s Free Verse: Writing on the timelessness and placelessness of Clark’s language in The Raft, Martin Esslin is of the view that this highly stylized free verse seems to militate against the playwright’s own intentions of presenting a realistic tragedy12: The question arises however: would it not have been more effective and easier for J. P. Clark to deal with his subject-matter in realistic, vernacular, prose terms? To me this certainly is true of his play The Raft which deals with the plight of four Nigerian lumbermen helplessly drifting to perdition downstream. This is tragedy, but it is realistic tragedy; much here depends on the differentiation between the townsman and the peasant, the old man and the younger generation. The free verse submerges rather than emphasizes these differentiations; it also detracts from the purely technical side of the tragedy, the men’s various attempts to salvage their craft. To deal with such a subject in verse would be justified only if the situation could be raised up to the level of an eternal poetic symbol. Thus the very fact that verse is used constitutes a programme of tremendous ambitiousness; and I don’t think that this particular play can live up to such a high ambition. It is therefore literally crushed under the load of its poetic objective. As a realistic play in realistic prose it would have been most gripping. But for such prose in the mouths of African working men there is no equivalent in English. These are the horns of the dilemma on which a playwright like J. P. Clark can be impaled. Perhaps aware of this weakness in Clark’s play, Osofisan deviated by treating his characters more individualized and fully motivated realistically by the use of multi-layered language. This has enabled his characters to use13 “different shades and idioms as spoken by different strata of that particular – and surely immensely important – segment of their society” in Another Raft. Oge speaks pidgin Nigerian English14 (“You know, Broda. Na shit. I save am from las’ night, just in case”), Gbebe, the philosopher-character, speaks refined English laced with flashes of poetry, the other characters speak in distinct English that reflects their individualism. This is a plus rather than a minus to Osofisan’s skill as a playwright in this adaptation. Writing on the use of language in adapting a play, Yerima posited15: Another principle which a playwright intending to adapt a play must consider is the act of perfecting his language and ideas. This is what enables him to impose his own vision on the original play. In establishing language and imagery in the new vision, the playwright is able to situate it within the social reality of his audience. Osofisan’s adaptation of Gogol’s The Government Inspector of 1836 contains changes in the language and imagery to make it a Nigerian play… What Osofisan does is to replace the language with the everyday spoken language in Nigeria. Polycap, the houseboy of Chief Gbonmiaiye-Lobiojo speaks in pidgin English which does not only place him within a social class but brings the theme of the play closer home. The above assertion by Yerima is appropriate to the play under consideration. Osofisan, as a very conscious and skilful playwright, is fully aware that his audience is not only Africans but non-Africans and even when his subject-matter are not universal, he must exhibit supreme craftsmanship in construction and language to appeal to non-Africans as well. In a society where English is the language of the educated classes, the playwright, according to Esslin16, “concerned are faced with the task of evolving a new, truly African brand of English which will eventually be able to embody the emotions, customs, and daily life of the people concerned as efficiently and beautifully as West Indian English expresses the character of the people who use it in daily life as well as in literature.” In this aspect, Osofisan has indeed succeeded. Osofisan and Brechtian Aesthetics: An avowed Marxist writer, Osofisan employed Brechtian aesthetics to impose his radical vision in this play. The brilliant use of alienation effect in the three-actor chorus is aimed at suspending the audience’s belief as is typical of Brecht’s plays. From the opening two scenes, which are like a prologue to the play, Osofisan tries to alienate his audience by forewarning them not to be too involved in the actions on the stage as the entire exercise is theatre, a make-believe world. Yemosa Three warns that17 “Just like on any of our ancient moonlit nights at the story-teller’s feet, all we do here is an open lie, a known and visible fairy-tale, well-known, and it is only your imagination that will colour it.” Agreeing, Yemosa One adds18: “Nothing you see will be real, or pretend to be. Nothing you hear will be true. All is fiction, the story is false, the characters do not exist. We are in a theatre, as you well know, and we see no need to hide it.” One great advantage of this technique in Osofisan’s dramaturgy is that it allows for simple scenery and swift movements on the stage without having to provide19 “a well-decorated room, reeking with grandeur and luxury, peopled by beautiful damsels and colourful heroes, with whom you are singularly privileged to mix, even if briefly, for the price of a ticket …” This technique is very popular in Marxist theatre and holds whatever the bourgeois class values highly with open disdain. To Marxist dramatists, the theatre has ceased to be an avenue for entertainment simpliciter, but a place to conscientize the proletarian class with a view to taking up arms. Osofisan had this in mind when he consciously brought together characters from all strata of the society – Lanusen, a prince of the palace, Chief Ekuroola, a successful Lagos tycoon and the Abore, Omitoogun, the old Priest of Yemosa, on the one hand and the two boatmen, Reore, the reigning Farmer King, and Agunrin, the carrier, on the other. Even right from the outset, the playwright deliberately warns us of this class struggle to expect in the stage direction of scene three as follows20: Lights bleed back slowly onto the state [sic] outlining the silhouettes of the raft and the figures on it … Their positions on the raft are defined, we will see later, by their class status, with PRINCE LANUSEN and the other chiefs together to one side; OMITOOGUN and his son Gbebe and Reore on another; the boatmen’s position somewhere else; and finally the sacrifice, bound down, the back to us, farthest away from the side of the audience. The bourgeois class, as we see later in the play, is to pay the price for this when the carrier (sacrifice), Agunrin, stages a military take-over of the raft and the rest is the dictatorship of the proletariat when the revolution succeeds as described in the stage direction of scene five21: “OROUSI, LANUSEN, and EKUROOLA are on one side, stripped to the waist, bound back-to-back, while AGUNRIN, a gun conspicuous in his hand, and also stripped, walks slowly round them.” Osofisan depicts a fearful society that is brooding on time-bomb because of class tensions and conflicts occasioned by injustice, poverty, exploitation, intrigues, religious hypocrisy and class segregation. Agunrin, who champions the cause of the poor in the play, calls the chiefs sharks and parasites22: “Sharks! They’re nothing but sharks!”; 23“And how shall we achieve it, if we carry our parasites back to town?” To Marxist dramatists, the definition of religion as the opium of the people by which the rich use to oppress and suppress the ignorant poor cannot be farther than the truth. Little wonder that no Marxist theatre is complete without poking fun at religion generally. In this play as in most of his plays, Osofisan is not an exemption as he openly celebrates the death of the gods. The gods are demystified, stripped naked in the market-places before the public glares. They do not exist but in the minds of the people as Osofisan put it in the mouths of his goddess-characters Yemosa Three and Two24: Gods and goddesses breed in the minds of men as hyacinths in fertile water And when we flower, we embellish the landscape of your imagining so colourfully, that men invest us with all kinds of extraordinary powers. Osofisan’s derogatory world-view about the myth of gods and goddesses has never received so great an expression like in this play. He sees man and god as one and the same thing,25 “We’re you, and you’re us”, says Yemosa One. According to the playwright, we can make or unmake our destiny as human beings and not owing to any gods or goddesses or the stars! Reore celebrates the death of the gods when he exclaims26: “There’s no goddess but our muscles! The strength of our forces combined.” However, despite the ambitiousness of Osofisan in this play, the ending is rather forced. His attempt to pierce the gloom in Clark’s The Raft with some rays of his vision of optimism culminate in dues ex machina, thus robbing the play of a realistic ending. On the seventh day of the expedition on the sea with only three characters left out of the nine that set out, the raft adrift is practically a wreck of logs that27 “knock together on the water”, to show how loose they are. Orousi, Oge and Reore (the three characters left on the raft) try to push it with all their might to turn the raft from a whirlpool, the famous current of Olobiripo28, “the dancing pool which has sucked down countless ships, including even the whiteman’s.” When it appears the raft will not turn by their lame efforts against the current, and they are going to drift past the town of Aiyepe or be swallowed in the whirlpool, suddenly the sea-sprites re-appear and they are saved! This is a pure case of dues ex machina! In fact, the playwright did not stop at that improbability, the three human characters are even made to solve the riddle of the sea-sprites which they did not know the details of! Another obvious snag in this play is the unnecessary reference to Clark’s play by Yemosa One in scene two29: “In 1964, the Nigerian playwright, J. P. Clark, now known as Clark-Bekederemo, wrote his play, The Raft, which came to symbolize the troubled situation of our newly-independent country …” This is uncalled-for and rather obsequious in an adaptation. Or was Osofisan afraid of a legal action on copyright violations by Clark? Or perhaps that was the agreement reached between him and his elder compatriot? The above apparent weaknesses notwithstanding, Osofisan is successful in what he sought out to do in this play. He has been able to chronicle the storms that have ceased to abet in our nation since Clark wrote The Raft in 1964. Even when all is not yet Uhuru, Osofisan seems to be saying like a seer that the pitch-dark, long night shall not long be victorious, but shall break into a new day by the pinpricks of dawn in the eastern horizon! Conclusion: From the foregoing, it is obvious that theatre adaptations are not alien to the Nigerian literary landscape. Our playwrights have not only adapted works of writers of different centuries and continents but have also looked inwards to works of their compatriots with a view to updating their entertainment values, social relevance and immediacy. This is what Osofisan has remarkably done with Clark’s The Raft in his adaptation, Another Raft. He has completely radicalized the theme of Clark’s, to show us a nation adrift. This is what he has also done to Wole Soyinka’s Isara: a Voyage Around Essay under the title, A New Dawn at Isara, to bring to the stage what not a few readers consider a rather complex autobiographical novel. Endnotes: 1. Yerima, Ahmed, Basic Techniques in Playwriting (Ibadan: Kraft Books Limited, 2003), p. 119. 2. Osofisan, Femi, Another Raft (Lagos: Malthouse Press, 1989?), p. 5. 3. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 84. 4. Esslin, Martin, “Two Nigerian Playwrights” in Introduction to African Literature, edited by Ulli Beier (Ibadan: Longman Group Limited, 1967), p. 260. 5. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 69. 6. Op. cit., p. 54. 7. Op. cit., p. 63. 8. Clark, J. P., The Raft in Three Plays (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 133. 9. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 82. 10. Yerima, op. cit., pp. 122 and 124. 11. Ibid., p. 122. 12. Esslin, op. cit., p. 257. 13. Ibid. 14. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 41. 15. Yerima, op. cit., pp. 127 and 128. 16. Esslin, op. cit., p. 258. 17. Osofisan, op. cit., p. 3. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Op. cit., p. 7. 21. Op. cit., p. 40. 22. Op. cit., p. 46. 23. Ibid. 24. Op. cit., p 83. 25. Op. cit., p. 84. 26. Op. cit., p. 85. 27. Op. cit., p. 75. 28. Op. cit., p. 78. 29. Op. cit., p. 5.

FIVE HUNDRED NIGERIAN POETS: A Babel of Voices

FIVE HUNDRED NIGERIAN POETS: A Babel of Voices By Isaac Attah Ogezi Perhaps nothing puzzles critics of modern Nigerian literature like the unprecedented explosion of poets at the expense of prose-fiction writers and dramatists. Today, every Nigerian upstart who can pen a few witty lines can lay claim to his being infected by the poetic muse such that we are now named as the country of poets! In the words of Ben Obumselu, ‘At one point, there were more than 100 volumes of poems, which shows that Nigeria is a bird-nest of singing poets’. This is quite ironic when one considers the kind of phobia our secondary school students have for poetry as one of the genres of literature. It is an anathema to them; a hard, boring nut to crack. Unfortunately, the school authorities are not making things any better when they entrust poetry in the hands of graduates of English literature who have no passion for the subject. The story is more disheartening at the University level where our so-called undergraduate students of English dread poetry like phonetics in linguistics. Yet, today poetry occupies the centre-stage of our modern writings. What does this portend for the future Nigerian literature? Given such ugly scenario, one is not surprised at the gargantuan junk modern Nigerian writers churn out by the hour like our waste-work movies in the unholy name of poetry. Pseudo poetry! In Voices From the Fringe (edited by Harry Garuba, Malthouse, 1988), one of the earliest and most representative anthologies of this militarized generation, the woe-betide poetry enthusiast has to wade through about fifty pages of the entire anthology before he finds any poem that satisfies the criteria of a poem let alone a good poem. It is the same sad story Poets in Their Youths (edited by Uche Nduka and Osita Ike, Osiri Books, 1989) and A Volcano of Voices (edited by Steve Shaba, ANA, 1999). Perhaps, the only successful anthology of this generation is 25 Nigerian Poets (edited by Toyin Adewale, Ishael Reed Publishing Co., 2000). Indeed, nothing sums up the present misnomer in our literature like Nadime Gordimer’s forward to Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali’s first poetry collection, Sounds of a Cowhide Drum (1971): ‘Many people write poetry, but there are few poets in any generation, in any country’. To mark the forty-fifth Independence Anniversary of the man-child called Nigeria, the Makurdi-based Aboki Publishers launched the most representative anthology of modern Nigerian poets under the most ambitious title: Five Hundred Nigerian Poets (2005), Volume I, edited by a practicing poet, Dr. Jerry Agada, the new Vice National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). The Aboki Publishers are a household name in our publishing industry, recognized earth-wide in their indefatigable efforts to promote the new voices of this generation. In an era where publishing is in a shambles, the Aboki publishers stand out as the most daring of all the publishers in Nigeria today. Thanks to them, the poet Moses Terhemba Tsenongu, would still have been strumming his kora unheard, in the department of English, Benue State University, Makurdi. This first volume of Five Hundred Nigerian Poets parades about two hundred and fifty Nigerian poets, both known and the totally obscure names. The themes are as diverse as there are many poets – overtly political themes, nature poems, feminism, a few love poems, etc. However, as representative as this anthology aspires, it is also a strong indictment on modern Nigerian poetry. In fact, the entire anthology reads like a babel of discordant, immature and imitative voices wailing in the wilderness! It is indeed a tragedy for Nigeria that out of the over two hundred poets anthology here, only eleven poets are promising. These are Jerry Agada (the editor-poet), Kevin Annechukwu Amoke, David Aondona Angya, Prince Chijioke Chinewubeze, B.M. Dzukogi, Isaac Attah Ogezi, Olu Oyawale, E.E. Sule, Moses Terhemba Tsenongu, Uche Peter Umex and Kabura Zakama. In ‘Ogbadibo’ (p.44), Jerry Agada achieves a remarkable poetic description of his homeland Ogbadibo, when he writes thus: Heavy rains Mark the season of hope Bumper harvests And prosperity. The terrain From head to toe Simmers with deep wounds And chronic sores Of cancerous gullies. Ravished and battered Ogbadibo lies prostrate Her loamy crust a deathtrap Deeply cut and chopped By the voracious rains. This poem conjures up in the mind of the reader J. P. Clark’s picturesque description of Ibadan in his short but powerful poem ‘Ibadan”. This kind of photographic description of scenery is a fast receding species in our modern poetry. On page 92, Kevin Anenechukwu Amoke distinguishes himself with his beautiful poem ‘What’, the endless philosophical question of existence. For a full appreciation of the poem, it is pertinent to reproduce the entire poem here: What hand sustains this star That it never sinks? What hand? And the eye of this evening Is already faint. A wasted breed, But this strand, full of desire, Of zeal To turn its back On this evening And sling its foot across the heart Of the night. High up the stair of the heavens It must lean on frames of dews Palming its monocle, ready for the hand. Why does the star not sink? What hand… Unlike most poets of this generation, Amoke in the above poem shows us how literarily conscious he is as a poet and a voracious reader of other poets. For in this single poem, we hear echoes of William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, Christopher Okigbo’s ‘The Stars Have Departed’ and the great William Shakespeare. For how well would an aspiring poet write without reading other great poets? Inarguably, the wittiest poem in the entire volume is David Aondona Angya’s ‘Broken Marriages’ (pp. 102-103). In spite of the child-persona’s crackling wit, the tone of tragedy is remarkably sustained. It runs as follows: A broken marriage is not only the painful cleavage between the Adam and Eve of my parentage it is also an excruciating rape against my emotional growth. A broken marriage is not only the absence of mummy’s full rations it is also the presence of another Eve with half rations. A broken marriage is not only the retrenchment of mine advocate before daddy it is also the employment of mine prosecutor before daddy. A broken marriage not only punishes culprits it also makes a scapegoat of me. The beauty of this poem obviously lies in the unusual concordance between the theme and the poetic craft. The didactic theme of broken marriages is superbly matched with mature artistry, thus saving it from the message-message poems of this generation. Happily enough, the sense of the comic in the poet does not belie the note of tragedy of all broken marriages. Another poem that succeeds so well in apt description of a situation apart from Jerry Agada’s ‘Ogbadibo’ (p.44) is Uche Peter Umez’s ‘Child Soldiers’ (p.449). In this poem, the poet is more concerned in probing deep into the complex psychology of a child-soldier rather than merely listing a catalogue of woes that befalls a child soldier. In the hands of a less successful poet, this poem would read like a sermon delivered from the pulpit. Fortunately, to Umez, poetry is beyond petty preachments but language, mystic language that nourishes the mind of the reader. A full reproduction of this beautiful poem will convince the reader of its maturity. The sky sprawls hazy in the harmattan sun A swath of dust brooks In the chill air In the ghost of a Community school Some rawboned boys Quaint machine guns by their side Puff at long strips of marijuana. Morose He sits on a stump Fingering the riffle Like a chaplet His eyes shards of glass His puerile mouth taut in a snarl Like a lion’s cub …. This night when the moon hatches Shadows and silhouettes He and the rebels The brittle village will raid. Ironically, this short, psychological description of the child soldiers speaks volumes of the negative effect of war on children than several essay-like poems of apprentice poets combined. It is a rare success in our modern poetry. Undoubtedly, the most pervasive theme of this anthology and indeed this generation, is the theme of cynicism, political ineptitude and disillusionment of a generation lost and adrift. However, no single poem captures this oppressive air of despondency and disenchantment with reasonably artistic merit like Kabura Zakama’s ‘My Generation’ (p. 477). Hear him ululate aloud: Here I am denuded of all plumage In the middle of my peak virility, A few years stolen by mean dreams, A few years to tease my fate: Of my generation I am the crystal image, Sapped skeletons lugging tattered hopes. We are compelled to survive, never to thrive, In order to maintain their fat selves, And preserve even the crumbs of our cake For their kids and the brats after their kind: Of my generation we are the pampered victims, Sapped skeletons watched by insatiate vultures. Born equal but bred to poor and polite, We drown in committees and commissions And when we die, as we surely must die, We are denied graves even at dumping sites: Of my generation we are the clear picture Sapped skeletons bound by barren dreams. Probably, the most mature and vibrant voice in this Babel of voices in the wilderness is, no doubt, Moses Terhemba Tsenongu. After several years of disciplined tutelage under the grandmaster of modern African poetry, Niyi Osundare, and with the publication of his two not-too-successful collections of poetry (Soliloquies and If I Kill God and Other Poems), Tsenongu is eventually finding his resilient voice as a poet. His recent poetry resonates with such evocative power and urgency that are reminiscent of the great poetry of Leopold Senghor, Dennis Brutus, David Diop, Christopher Okigbo and Niyi Osundare. In his lewd but sweet poem ‘ To Kristina’ (p. 419), Tsenongu pleads passionately to Kristina thus: When I finally glide into your globe Where I’ve been seeking admittance Since I discovered the mints of treasure stowed there And the mines of pleasure therein stored; When I finally land home in you – R world, please do not kill me with ecstasy; Just guide me gently to the right places Like you did when I havened in Hamburge. After a careful second reading, one discovers with delight that the above poem is more than a mere amorous love poem like Brutus’ ‘ A troubadour I traverse’ but a passionate plea, nay, invocation for inspiration from the creative Muse personified in Kristina. To Tsenongu, Kristina is to him what goddess Idoto was to Okigbo – a source of inspiration. In the first poem ‘Idoto’ in his volume Heavens-gate, Okigbo (who regards himself as the reincarnation of his grandfather) chants to goddess Idoto in the following evocative lines: Before you, mother Idoto, naked I stand, before your watery presence, a prodigal, leaning on an oilbean; lost in your legend… under your power wait I on barefoot, Watchman for the watchword at HEAVENSGATE Out of the depths my cry give ear and hearken. Tsenongu belongs to the school of thought in poetry that believes that poetry is not all about writing privatist and arch-obscurantist lines of the defunct Ibadan school, only decipherable to the mystic creators and their deluded highbrow critics and readers, who see poetry as a message in the bottle; a difficult puzzle too sublime for the common man in the street. No, he believes fervently that poetry can still be accessible to the masses like Ojaide’s without robbing it of the necessary finery. After all, what is the primary duty of the poet to his society? According to the Norwegian poet-playwright, Henrik Ibsen, ‘The duty of the poet is to make us see’ with breathing images. Little wonder then that Tsenongu’s poetry is infused with vivid images and symbols that make the readers see better. In the first stanza of his poem ‘I See a New Horizon’ (p. 422), Tsenongu proves himself a classic imagist of the likes of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Niyi Osundare when he writes : I see a new horizon beckoning onto me I see a new sun splashing its rays on my night And a flower responding to a suns’ sperms [sic] And a bee responding to a flower’s flavour. No doubt, Tsenongu’s poetry is indeed simple, yes, but a sophisticated simplicity of the kind that can disarm non-poetry lovers of any misgivings they may have against poetry like Plato. Apart from the few poets discussed briefly above, most of the poems in the anthology read like the entries in a beginners’ class of poetry in our secondary schools, what with the poor usage of language by most of the poets. Poetry from time immemorial is regarded as the most expressive form of any language. It is only poets that can make a language grow because of the resources at their disposal. Shakespeare helped the English of the Elizabethan times grow with beautiful expressions such as ‘the mind’s eye’, ‘to be, or not to be’, ‘a sea of troubles’, ‘there’s the rub’ and several original expressions that enriched the English language that we speak today. Unfortunately, the English of most of the poets in this anthology is lamentably bad and unpoetic. It is heart-rending to see unpardonable grammatical errors such as ‘Of the aches/ That comes with pain’ (p. 3), ‘which were been done’ (p. 109), ‘If thou have’ (p. 166), ‘from time in memorial’ (p. 330), ‘pump and pageantry’ (p. 331), ‘post humus awards’ (p. 351), ‘today your enemies bath with’ (p.394), ‘comrades awaiting breathe’ (p. 403), ‘we stood agaped’ (p. 403), ‘if the ancestors has choose’ (p. 427), ‘has choosen’ (p. 427), ‘uniform men’ (p. 428), ‘comes the screeching cars…’(p.428), ‘I will do my possible best’ (p. 457), ‘that blows pass’(p. 469), ‘I have never know’ (p. 470), ‘who dares distil water’ (p. 471). There are also a few typographical errors which the editor allowed to go to press, unedited, to wit: ‘They very strangeness’ (p. 41), ‘The lied’ (p. 52), etc. Worse still, most of the poems suffer from loose structure owing to the weak control of language by the poets. In consequence, most of the poems are unnecessarily long, windy and incoherent. The economy of language as a distinct feature of poetry is lacking in most of the poems. Unfortunately, the few big names such as Maria Ajima and Akachi Adimorah-Ezeigbo are better prose writers with poetry as their Achilles’ heels! Thus, their poetry cannot be discharged and acquitted of the charges levelled against most of the immature poets in this anthology. Waste work to use Chimwezu’s favourite expression, such as Elizabeth Adebimpe’s ‘Adam and Eve: This Place we Make’ (p. 18), Globa O. Dhikrullah’s ‘A Pentent’s Prayer’ (p. 165), Gaius E. Okwezuzu’s ‘You Bolted out of Home’ (p. 328) and Samuel Igbaroola Oluseye’s ‘A Song of Praise’ (p. 337) are incurably bad and deserve to be weeded out ab initio. The only snag to the anthology’s claim to be the most definitive anthology of modern Nigerian poetry is the conspicuous absence of important poets of this generation such as Remi Raji, Promise Okwkwe, Ogaga Ofowodo, Maik Nwosu, Angela Nwosu, Uche Nduka, Nduka Otiono, Chika Unigwe, Obiwu, Emman Shehu, Pius Adesanmi, Okey Ndibe, Olu Oguibe, Toni Kan, Helon Habila, Uzor Mazim Uzoatu, Nike Adesuyi, Sola Osofisan, Chiedu Ezeanah, Amu Nnadi, Victoria Kankara, Obu Udeozo, Ahmed Maiwada, Omale Allen Abdul-Jabbar, Nengi Josef, Unoma Azuah, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, Urdeen Sylvester, Maryam Ali and a host of many others. One does hope that in the next volume, these stars in our literary firmament shall be given enough orbits to twinkle. In conclusion, Five Hundred Nigerian Poets, Volume I, despite the lapses dwelled on in the foregoing, is a most ambitious anthology of modern Nigerian poetry and a milestone in the history of the development of our literature. The Aboki publishers and the editor, Dr. Jerry Agada, deserve high commendation for showcasing these fresh voices to the world. In the whole of Africa, save for Wole Soyinka’s Poems from Black Africa, this anthology has no rival and thus can lay claim to be the most definitive and expressive anthology of Nigerian poetry writers and authors across the country. It is indeed a must read for all poetry lovers wearied of reading stale English and American poetry.