Lyrical Birthcries -A Review Of Birthcry By Obi Nwakanma, Press Alliance Books, Lagos, 2013 pp.81 By Sanya Osha
Nwakanma’s poetry, on the other hand, has an unmistakable lyrical quality mostly stripped of an unearthly grandeur. This makes it unbloated and readily approachable by the everyday sensibility. In other words, his work is not merely intended as poetry for poets, as is so often the case with Okigbo, but poetry which is frequently imbued with a directness that is able to incorporate the mundane and the sublime in the same breath.
The first poem in the collection, ‘The Story of a Donkey’, has a child protagonist very much like Okigbo’s protagonist contemplating the illustrious ambience of Idoto. But here, the similarities end even as it is clear that there is a quest to achieve some as yet elusive – and also slightly intimidating – poetic undertaking. A measured restraint – which isn’t to say an inarticulacy – that bears a civilised imprimatur is evident in the first few poems of Nwakanma’s collection, ‘This night as I muse your coming/Counting the named constellations,/Crossing the imaginary lines where stars cluster’ (p.3). In spite of the elevated subject matter, the tone is still warm and inviting. This warmth increases when Nwakanma recalls the memory of his great grand-mother who led the women of her village against British colonialists in 1929. An almost forgotten event in history, as a result, is excavated and relived. Even within the context of these rather rude circumstances, the theme of birth is still discernible in the not distant background. In a poem, ‘The Harsh Wind Orchestra’, Nwakanma evokes disparate images within the span of a few lines, images associated with degeneracy and free love: ‘Exhausted now by carousing,/Ascended the spiraling tower,/Towards Babylon,/To the crack of bitter voices,/And there,/They die of free love’ (p.7). Here, the protagonist assumes the stance of a voyeur rather than a participant which somewhat occludes the ethical character of the scene.
‘Birthcry’, which provides the collection with its title, is expectedly awash with birth cries, foetal matter and lyrical beginnings. For instance: ‘And you see with your/ Foetal eyes how the cloud lifted, revealing the sun,/Each time the face of the earth darkened/With tears?’(p.11). In this poem, the subject matter literally explodes with meaning. But in the next poem, ‘Saturday Morning’, the mundane is granted an almost celestial weight in which a scene dealing with the apparently simple pleasures of coffee drinking by luxuriant flower vases punctuates the most definitely forbidding largeness of existence. Nonetheless, love manages to triumph as the ultimate meaning or reason for life. Here, Nwakanma is quite clear as to where he stands. In ‘Orpheus at the Gates’, the mundane and the sublime are again conjoined to reveal the epiphanic phenomenon of birth. In ‘In the Steps of Manuel Sendero’, the child is fortified with empathy, ‘A glimpse of the threshold startled him/The running waters rattled him/The load argument of war frightened him!’ (p.18). In ‘Ingress’, Nwakanma displays his skill in handling sensuality and sexuality: ‘The bare pubes refreshed,/The womb is now in quickening […] It is the ornate bottle with liquid densities/ It is the cup overflowing with viscera/It is the cupola and minaret of desires’(p.25). The sexual motif becomes even more vivid in ‘Eri an Amaku’, ‘My own hands bathed in the clitoral lips of a lover’ (p.27). Not much can be said to be left to the imagination in this instance. However, the motif of birth is often dominant even when Nwakanma obviously has other thoughts in mind: ‘So the old fables lead to the rock –/ Where we must bury your umbilical cord./To the night, in which you and I/Crossed in lifeline, and bonded’ (p.29).
Nwakanma is often able to infuse explicit political material with the leitmotif of birth in a convincing manner. As such, the tragedies of Biafra, Kigali and the 2002 bomb explosions in Lagos are all linked in various ways to the ever present cycle of birth. It is difficult to forget the searing imagery of the lines from ‘Black Sunday’ which deals with the unfortunate Lagos incident: ‘He blazed through the feathered circuit/ Potent-/ He came disguised as a child/And entered the camp of warriors’ (p.37).
Another tragic incident that captures Nwakanma’s imagination is the memory of Leonard Gakinya who was hanged in Springfield, Missouri, in 2002. Race, sex and death are conjoined in a way that radically questions the validity and ultimately, the feasibility of the supposedly all-inclusive American dream: ‘And I remember the smouldering heat –/ The unsurveyed pudenda – the unvisited hacienda/ Echoing to itself ventriloquizing, the wind./ Melanin is under my skin, and that is nothing new either’ (p.39).
In ‘A Brief Memoir of Time’, Nwakanma furthers his exploration of explicit political subject matter. The event of the Belgian colonisation of the Congo and Nelson Mandela’s incarceration at Robben Island are given due attention without the customary lapse into poetry-cum-politics poor taste.
When all is said and done, Nwakanma’s collection is consistently even and he is clearly a poet who has discovered his métier, one who is equally at home handling themes pertaining to the awesomeness of nature and the tragic events of African history within the span of a few lyrical couplets.
Sanya Osha, a poet, philosopher and novelist, resides in Pretoria, South Africa. An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) is his most recent novel and A Troubadour’s Thread, a volume of poetry (2013), is his latest creative offering.
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 13:00:45 -0600
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Towards a New African Renaissance
From: meochonu@gmail.com
To: USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
Towards a New African Renaissance
Moses E. Ochonu
As the twenty first century trudges on, Africa appears to stand at a crossroads marked by two parallel developments. The first of these two seminal forces is the resurgence of existential, nationalist, and political questions left unsettled by the messy march to independence and decolonization. Although variegated and complex, taking on regional and sub-regional identities and patterns, one may characterize these questions collectively in one general rubric as the residual complications of postcolonial nation building.
The second instrumental development is the dizzying circulation of ideas, peoples, technologies, and vocabularies between Africa and the West on the one hand, and within physical and virtual African worlds on the other. These two events continue apace, aided by new, informational organs of sociability, debate, and discussion.
Africa’s future will be determined in large measure by how it manages and responds to these ongoing processes.
Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, recently inaugurated a committee to craft the modalities of a national conference that would bring representatives of Nigeria’s multiple ethnic, occupational, and gender constituencies together to discuss the existential and structural problems plaguing a Nigerian union that many agree has stifled the aspirations and hopes of its constituent peoples. The announcement set off a nationwide debate on the motives, trajectory, and scope of such a dialogue.
But national dialogues are not new in Africa. In fact when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and along with it the Cold War rivalries that actuated and sustained autocracies and authoritarianism on the continent, it unleashed a wave of national stocktaking and deliberative assembly that Western advocates of democracy and political accountability jumped on with funding and intellectual endorsement. From Benin Republic to Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) to Zambia, the quest for a catch-all national conversation on unsettled foundational questions and issues previously subsumed under hurriedly packaged decolonization agendas consumed political actors. Africans sought to rebuild nations ravaged by Cold War-subsidized dictatorships, corruption, and festering national discord.
The questions that bubbled to the surface in these national conferences all indicate the failure of postcolonial African nation-states to address the evolving aspirations and agitations of ethnic, regional, and religious constituents. At a broader level, these questions also point to the failure of the totalizing nation-state structure crafted by departing colonial regimes to accommodate the competing idioms of solidarity, belonging, and identity that those regimes clumsily lumped into it.
Many African states have embraced in principle the idea of revisiting the questions left unresolved by colonial regimes, but they have balked at attempts to have holistic conversations that include any and all aspirations, no matter how constructive or disruptive. It is in the nature of the nation-state to guard its claim to sovereignty jealously against alternative political and territorial aspirations. Moreover, the guardians of African states prefer the familiar structural status quo, however broken and unsatisfying, to the uncharted path of searching for a more functional alternative.
In that spirit of waffling between acceptance of national dialogue and a rejection of its rupturing possibilities, the Nigerian government left the break up of Nigeria and the self-determination of ethno-regional nations off the menu of topics to be discussed in the proposed national conference.
The problem with this approach is that you can't inaugurate a political conversation on the many existential questions plaguing the Nigerian state and foreclose the broaching of the break-up option. It is difficult to corral political conversations into preferred boxes or outcomes while avoiding uncomfortable questions that depart from predetermined trajectories.
African states facing similar existential threats and questions as Nigeria ought to move away from the Nigerian model of declaring the union, a colonial product of messy, arbitrary amalgamation, an inviolable baseline of national structural and constitutional reform. Instead, they should give those who want to pursue their political aspirations outside the inherited state framework and those who simply see that political architecture as an insufferable drag on their ambitions a deliberative platform to convince their compatriots. It is the civilized, democratic thing to do.
All over Africa, separatist and centrifugal pressures continue to mount on increasingly fractured and dysfunctional postcolonial nation-states. The problem, for now, is that instead of embracing and productively engaging these pressures, most African states are shooing them underground or reacting with paranoid aggression. It is the wrong approach, especially in a twenty first century geopolitical order in which self-determination, decentralization, and political consent have become paradigmatic cornerstones of nationhood.
Centrifugal pressures are regenerative, creative ingredients in nation building, for they serve to shake stakeholders from their complacency and to prevent citizens from taking the nation as a settled, sacrosanct, final product. Besides, providing a platform for those who desire separate states will afford African states an opportunity to understand the depth and breadth of the disenchantment of many African peoples with the existing structures and functions of their countries. Additionally, it is a way to redirect the more virulent forms of these separatist political imaginations into political mediums that would tame and mainstream them before they morph into something threatening and violent.
As I think about the national conference idea, I am reminded of two interrelated problems that need to be deconstructed, understood, and resolved. The first is that there are several unfinished or truncated nationalisms and decolonizations all over Africa. The second is the reality that, across Africa, there seems to be a growing fetish of the nation-state as a final, linear end-point of political organization and state formation, which in turn reduces the possibility of revising and, when necessary, undoing the territorial political bequests of colonizers.
On the first point, a cursory survey of the continent reveals many spots in which the postcolonial state finds itself dealing with the pesky burden of its illegitimacy in the eyes of a growing number of malcontents. More disturbingly, this narrative of illegitimacy is increasingly being articulated in the claims of ethno-regional entities that never bought into the nation to begin with. In Cameroon, the peoples of the former British colony of Southern Cameroons, English speaking and Anglophone in mannerisms and outlook, want out of the postcolonial nation state of Cameroon. They have refused to accept their place in the state since independence from France and a 1961 referendum put them under the territorial jurisdiction and administrative orbit of French Cameroon.
In the Western Sahara, the people's struggle for a separate state or at least for substantial autonomy from Moroccan rule is all but forgotten. In Nigeria, a resurgent Biafra movement is now one of several movements of ethno-nationalist self-determination. In the Central African Republic (CAR), the DRC, Sudan, Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Kenya, Angola, Ivory Coast, and several other African states, seemingly settled national configurations are busting at the seams with unaddressed pressures and alternative political narratives, and the work of colonial state-building is unraveling. Regions and peoples that colonial state makers threw into strange national cauldrons are increasingly voting with their feet against such arrangements.
The other aspect of the existential problem is the need to locate where, when, and how, to quote master storyteller, Chinua Achebe, the proverbial rain began to beat us. This quest for original causality leads logically to problems associated with the nation-state as a generic political archetype in Africa.
The nation-state as a form of disciplined territorial political space is a relatively recent idea, having its origins in the treaty of Westphalia in the mid 18th century. In Africa its origin is even more recent, dating only to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet Africans have become so wedded to this state form, seduced by its global popularity. This is in spite of the fact that, being a jealous and domineering entity that brooks little or no challenge to its claims, the nation-state continues to stifle alternative expressions of African nationhood and group political solidarity. Given the recency of the nation-state and the non-linear movement of human political evolution, the notion that the African postcolonial nation state is beyond negotiation or reconstitution and is a sacred baseline of political organization, debate, and governance is untenable, and retrogressive in the twenty first century.
My feeling is that in addition to having a debate on whether the national houses that colonizers built can still accommodate the varying, divergent aspirations of their occupants, a parallel debate on how best to reeducate Africans on the artificiality, newness, and awkwardness of their nation-states needs to begin. Africans need to become more receptive to legitimate challenges to the existing nation-states of Africa, whether these challenges envisage new, more functional nations, supra-national regional blocs, or a continental government of equal member-states.
The second potential catalyst for Africa’s development in the twenty first century turns on the degree to which the continent’s leaders harness and channel into productive endeavors the ideas, peoples, goods, intellectual capital, and technologies moving in and out of Africa.
This effort to take advantage of new ideas and mediums to rebuild, reclaim, and revitalize Africa is as much an intellectual process as it is a political project. As thinkers on Africa’s fate and future, African intellectuals must accept that certain aspects of their analytical toolkit are now simply outmoded, rooted as they are in struggles and constructs that were relevant to sociopolitical moments that have expired. For instance, the old Utopian pan-Africanist vision that sought to dissolve rather than understand intra-African difference is no longer tenable.
Without explicitly intending it, some of these outmoded constructs shut off discussions on communal fissures, contentious relations between contiguous African peoples, internal hegemonies of class, race, and ethnic privilege, and the ugly underbellies of a frayed Afro-Arab détente.
As the shine of anticolonial victories have worn off and the failures of Africa's rulers have manifested themselves, African youths, armed with new critical tools and empowered by informational innovations of the twenty first century, are constructing new outlines of what it means to be African and act African, rejecting old definitions for new, dynamic ones. African modes of intellectual reflection have been slow to capture this shift. This needs to change.
Meanwhile, Africans are moving in and out of the continent at a pace previously unseen, carrying new techniques for tackling old problems and new vernaculars for discussing the challenges of their countries. Young, restless Africans are taking technologies and ideas patented in the global North and adapting them to distinctly African needs. These constant physical and virtual movements between Africa and the world and between different African nodes will ensure that Africa’s increasingly visible dynamism is replenished by new energies coming from its roving intellectual diasporas. The ways in which Africa taps this circulating set of ideas and technologies will go a long way in determining its twenty first century status in the world.
Furthermore, as the spaces for discussing, brainstorming, and troubleshooting on Africa’s slate of challenges increasingly take on informal characteristics with the popularity of social media and others organs of democratized punditry, African leaders and intellectuals have to engage with nontraditional African discursive communities nurtured on informal technologies of expression and problem solving.
All of this throws up larger, more consequential questions. How can African leaders and intellectuals reckon with increasingly mobile African bodies, ideas, and objects? How can they keep up with the narratives that are animating the lives of African communities in fixed, situated locales and in shifty information landscapes such as Internet forums and social networks? How do we write African stories that are proliferating in cyberspaces into our rendering of African realities, into our descriptions of African ways of seeing and structuring the world, and, ultimately, into our prescriptions for an African renaissance?
Africa’s future depends on the extent to which these ideational, human, and technological flows between Africa and the world and within Africa intersect to create new economic, political, and intellectual paradigms. The first imperative is a basic existential one of remaking the territorial, constitutional, and political contours of postcolonial African nation-states in the diverse, complex images of their constituents.
This piece was published in the current edition of Kilimanjaro, an annual pan-African magazine published by Nigeria’s Trust Media Group, publishers of Daily Trust newspaper. The magazine is published yearly to coincide with the African-of-the-Year Award Ceremony, which holds in Abuja, Nigeria, every January.
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Gandhi
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