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.