It is of course, often worthwhile pleasure to engage Odia on a subject on which he does show his paces such as poetry, and particularly his poetry, and you can be sure to go away with unique insight, whether or not you agree with him. And for the records, I do not touch any other palm-wine, except from Ede-Obala, where God himself came down to teach the vintners the ancient craft. But to this question of Odia's poems, and I should start with a rather general statement: the art of poetry is Aaron throwing down his staff on the ground, and it turning sometimes into the serpent of knowledge or sometimes into the rose of the virgin. It is, for some of us, the art of the magus. Even political poets must have the sleight of hand, or it is not poetry if words become too dull or too plain. But that is not my problem with Odia's poetry here. And I have excerpted what I consider the weakest of his selection from his mature years posted here, considering that The Poet Lied, may now be considered his juvenilia. The power of The Poet Lied of course is not so much in its elegance, but in its brusque honesty ( I am working currently on a book on contemporary Nigerian poetry 1980-2000 and I hope to engage this with a bit more detail). But let us for the moment concentrate on "Crooked Timber" below:
CROOKED TIMBER (For Fela)
monkey no fine, but 'im mama like am
it was the knife stuck in his back that gave him eyes
the sky crashing upon the day of freedom
woke the natives of his person
to the joy he thought was only a dream
it was the knife stuck in his back
his broken sax on the rubbish heap
taught the musician of rattles and banter
to take the bitterleaf of his song to the soupmaker
the drought that reaped his crops granted him
the Will that powered stones for rainmaking
the silence of his prized cows brought the joy
of drumming to crowds preying upon God Almighty
true, the future we look forward to
also takes us by the hand to the past we left behind;
the secrets of evolution which taught us to fly
makes us siblings of the dinosaurs quitting creation's ant-holes
yes, we forever fear power because of the weakness
of those who possess it
we let ourselves be possessed
because of the fate that lacks apostrophes
it was the knife stuck in his back that gave him eyes
the eyes grown afresh from his wounds
brought match-flares to the darkness of flying knives
to rework life's crooked timber.
My problem begins right from the epigram that ought to foreground it: but it has no connection to the poem. It feels like an arbitrary insertion to a poem that drifts down its own different route. Of course, the poem is clearly about Fela, and about his life of struggle and his conflicts with brutal power. It is familiar story. And so, what is the new dimension to this story? It is the same one dimensional narrative - no complex questions raised; the pathos is at the surface; there is no Fela that carries significant historical weight except that Fela we've always known, who is always a victim, who fought with power, and suffered for it, and of course his "saxophone" is always broken in these poems. It is the cliché of Fela. I did also point to the problem of the language, which Odia gamely, parsed. And it brought tears to my eyes because it felt as though the poet was lying to himself! Okay, let me emphasize this point again: "It was the knife stuck in his back that gave him eyes" is carless metaphor because it is inconceivable! And if we take it further down the line, "match-flare to the darkness"/ I can see, but /"the darkness of flying knives" - particularly in the context of its use does not even pretend to suggest abstraction, it is simply incongruous! It might sound nice in the tongue, but it really mishmash of imagery. The repetition or the refrain of that line is also an obvious crutch in this poem, and at best, gives it a slight rhetorical urgency. The best, and clearest stanza in this poem is the fourth stanza. But even that is marred by the tail of the last line, because it is overstated, and the great art of poetry depends largely on implied things; on the economy of both thought and utterance, so that the stanza should have gained if Odia learns to pause, where he ought to, or secures the services of a fine poetry editor, so that this stanza would read something like this:
true, the future we look forward to
also takes us by the hand to the past we left behind;
evolution which taught us to fly
makes us siblings of the dinosaurs
There is a more compact, crystal feel to it, shaved of its excess! It is not "the secret of evolution" that taught us to fly, it is evolution itself. And the word "forever" in the next stanza simply also is a little too obvious, and that line can do without it. And so on, and so forth. And I'm glad that Odia agrees with me on the issue of poetic diction, and structure. But for me, the formal unity of a work is certainly critical, and I do not mind poets appropriating classical styles, for as long as they re-invent it. After all, Walcott used the Horatian Odes for Omeros and it worked. My problem is when it is merely imitative. I do know the meaning of "onugbu" - my problem is with the subject of he poem taking his bitterleaf soup to his soup maker! What exactly is that? And I did not read Odia's take on the NLNG prize prior, nor have I read the poems that won that prize. But be that as it may.
Obi Nwakanma
Sent: Wednesday, November 1, 2017 9:41 AM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - MY FELA AND GUEVARA POEMS
MY FELA AND GUEVARA POEMS
By
Odia Ofeimun
I will give Obi Nwakanma the best palmwine from my favorite Freedom Park joint when next he is in Lagos. Not for his usually contused politics, recently mellowed, of Igbo irredentism that is gradually beginning to concede that the homeland is as much across the rest of the country as in the village republics of Ndigbo. No. The palmwine is to celebrate his criticism of my Fela and Guevara poems that, on a whim, I decided to make available to everybody; although they were for two friends participating in the recent Felabrations and the Guevara celebrations of recent weeks.
The first of the Fela poems was written before I was twenty years old and published in The Poet Lied. In 1980. The last was written after Fela took "the bitter leaf of his song to his soup-maker". There is nothing esoteric or archaic about bitter leaf. It is a daily staple called black soup in many Nigerian hometowns. It is called onugbu in Obi Nwakanma's village. It has the curative power of bitter kola; not like kolanut which some may cuddle because it gives you an immediate 'high'. Would the poet and critic have preferred that I litter the poems with endnotes? It would have been too bemusing for people who take pounded yam with bitter leaf soup on a daily basis.
At any rate, the proof of the effectiveness of the poems is Obi Nwakanma's evisceration of the most accessible lines in the poems. Although he speaks and writes English, he claims he does not understand it. So he cannot see how drought may destroy crops, harden the earth into stone that the rain-makers actually use for rain-making. It is not about whether rain-makers succeed in making rain but that they do try. Adversity does generate its anti-thesis in many human situations in the way that the baton, gun butt and bayonet charges against Fela hurt him into song. The Fela poems were deliberately crafted in a self-aware form to demonstrate the linguistic conundrum in which Fela's music grew. I would have eaten my own head if I had failed to capture it as I have done.
I should add that I deliberately used the language of the context of the poems, including the pidgin inserts, to locate the context. Nwakanma's hasty presumption-as-literary-criticism, is actually no more than a market-placement for his kind of poetry which celebrates fluff without edifying. The Fela poems show that I opted for the language of serious everyday discourse from my very first poems. Those who measure the validity of the poems by what the masses are supposed to want, the same masses that they refuse to give the right kind of education, should eat their hearts out.
I need to stress the point that I am a political poet who also writes other kinds of poetry. Including love poetry. I push values, not ideologies or slogans. I uphold the kind of everyday speech that deploys images and concepts which resonate with the subject matter and the impact anticipated. I have never been a voter for that rootless elegance which seeks to blanch out the reality of the time or place, in order to be fashionable, or culturally and politically correct. When I deploy archaisms, I do so with my eyes open in the same way that I do not run away from the morbid if it happens to describe proficiently an environment that evokes and lives it.
When, for instance, I use the word Lagos, as a verb, as in "lagosed", it is evidently licentious and was meant to be. Prove that it is not apt. The truth is that Obi Nwakanma is not at home to the truth-value of even his own arguments. I am at home with mine whether in my Latin American poems. Or the poems written in and about Europe. If I am remembered as a poet who did not shy away from looking his world in the face, I would consider it a fair deal. I truly feel good that I have a Fela poem in every collection that I have published. It's been part of a determined bid to capture the spirit of our times in the kind of language that I use in everyday discourse.
No doubt, every poet chooses his diction and swims or sinks by it. Unknown to many, Obi Nwakanma is actually applying to me, but wrongly, a position I took on the recently announced 2017 NLNG Nigerian Prize for Literature. I argue that the winning entry is a stylistic dead end using the poetic diction of the eighteenth century that I would not like to present to the world as the model for Nigerian poetry in 2017. It is a buy-back of ancien regime poetic diction that, emulating Alexander Pope, would actually be quite a scandal if it strayed into the 'forcefield' of a contemporary European poet. It's the kind of poetry that describes a black person as going redder and redder as his anger rises. This is not my idea of a self-aware use of poetic diction. It is a mis-match. Obi Nwakanma thinks he is doing a similar spot critique of my poems when he writes - what I really should quote at length:
"And this is the problem with much
> of contemporary Nigeria poetry: it is stuck in the same
> language and manners that belong, more with the early to
> mid-twentieth century English,
> than to the language of the moment, with its free,
> coruscating texture. Poetry, for it to shake the ground on
> which it walks, must revise and affect the manner and
> language of its era. These Odia's poems suck!"
This is a thoroughly illiterate opinion as anyone can tell who knows that, by pointing out the collections in which the poems are to be found, I was actually indicating that the poems were written in the sixties, seventies, eighties into the nineties of the last century. Couldnt he just have read what was presented instead of cooking up some fib about "the problem with much of contemporary Nigeria poetry?". How does writing poetry about the sixties in the language of the sixties, heightened for effect, become such a crime for someone who imagines that he is writing poetry in "the language of the moment, with its free, coruscating texture". Translate: rootless poetry unrelated to time and place. Which shakes nothing. On the contrary, I do hope that when people want to know Nigeria, and what kind of poems were written in Nigeria in those decades, they would find my poetry true to, and perhaps, representative of, the genre. In the 21st century, I write the kind of poetry that meets the way my circumstances hurt me into song. My circumstances are broad, covering the whole world, as anyone can tell who comes across the three collections in my HANDSHAKES ACROSS DIVISION. I would wish that someday the poems will be acknowledged for bringing the world together in one fist. Those who wish to write the kind of poetry that aspires to be the automatic poetry of the whole world will actually never write the poetry of any part of the world - no matter how they luxuriate in what Obi Nwakanma calls "the language of the moment, with its free, coruscating texture". Because it coruscates, it is bound to be 'failed' poetry. The language of Fela's times, uncovering and celebrating Fela's mystique, is a more momentous deal.
Otherwise, there is no unchanging, eternal, language of poetry. The fashions and transient mannerisms, that Nwakanma appears over-committed to, happen to be too fluffily based on his 'coruscations'. Great literary cultures are not built on coruscations. To put it straight: it is the kind of poetry that Obi Nwakanma valorises that sucks! He proves it by refusing to acknowledge the language of the moment when he sees one. Rather than being a put-down of my poetry, as he thinks, his objections to aspects of the Fela and Guevara poems, actually elevate the poetry. Some other critic. 'Biko Agozino', wishes I should have rendered all of the poems in pidgin: "Instead of the mystery that Fela was the stoned rainmaker, he for say that Fela smoke Igbo". This is a deliberated non-interest in poetry, making it look like a distraction rather than the serious matter it is. It ought to be left severely alone, as a joke. Except that it is a joker's equivalent of Nwakanma's assumption that the philosophy of what poetry does or should do, is itself a function of 'coruscations'.
Poetry, I dare say, is not just private communication; no matter what post-modernist argon you go by. It is also a public voice. Reaching only for the pleasures of the senses to the chagrin of the intellect is not part of its bargain. Those who do not agree are writing so much love poetry, these days, that ring so untrue because so mannered. Believe me: I would never have written a line of poetry, if it were merely a matter of doing 'coruscations' or daffodils without the casualities and Guernicas in a world so deranged
Odia Ofeimun
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