Poets'Blog

Poets on Poetry: ..... Motivation, Purpose and Environment...

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The beauty of silence welling up

-Otobotekere

Poetry came to me like one stumbling onto gems. I have always had great admiration and awe for poets. In preference for the sciences, I had stopped literature in high school third grade although I truly excelled in the subject. But after prospecting in the sciences I made a swift turn back to the arts: history, geography, economics and religion. Yet I never stopped being a prolific consumer of literature materials with great reverence for poets and poetry. My conventional education ended at high school for lack of funds to continue to college and I started researching in almost every medium to becoming a writer, starting with prose, then poetry.
Poetry to me is like a vent for my frustrations in life or for bringing out beautiful moments in black and white. It was the very deep love I had for my father, Abun Tom Dzenchuo, knowing he hadn�t long to live among us. It actually started in 2003 when I heard of my father�s death. My life has been that of hardships and hurt by rivalries in a polygamous family. Confused by the natural order of life I self-exiled to Nigeria, researching and writing prose (my whereabouts unknown to my relations). I had to return home when I heard of his death conceiving �My Sky Is Left With No Sun,� �Dark Was The Night,� �Lie Thee In Sleep Transient Might Aghem Prince,� et cetera. I took to solitude, lost in the world of my own making especially when communing with my past: those beautiful moments from the memory when I went to farm with my father; the late night into the early morning debates we always had about African Nations: �Arise O Africa,� �Prince of Peace -for Hammarskj�ld,� �Flame Over Lumumba�s Ashes,� �Bobe Jua�s Golden Age,� the reunification plebiscite of West Cameroon on whether to merge with East Cameroon: �The Reunification Seams;� �Little Foncha�s Might,� �Unsung Hero.� My father also enlightened me much about the Cameroon�s North West culture (pristine people and cultural purists) and the confederacy of clans that make up the Aghem Fondom polity.
His death left a huge gulf in my life as if the smoldering light suddenly went off my bamboo splinters leaving me in deep darkness. My father�s memory is the main reason behind most of my poems as sort of consolation. Though unlettered, he always told me Africa would be a tool in the hands of the neocolonialists if we do not stand up as one people, citing the �Ancestral Broom� the might of many splinters.

 

My life�s dreams started unfolding when I read The Atlas of Africa prepared and published by Jeune Afrique under the direction of Regine Van Chi-Bonnaedel with publishing director Danielle Ben Yahmed. The Atlas of Africa reveals the historic, geographic, political, economic and religious position of Africa vis-a-vis the world powers.

My poems are a reflection of my thoughts, vision and goal for life: that of seeing Africa Unite (a resurrection of the lost vision of Kwame Nkrumah, Bob Marley, Muamah Gaddhaffi, Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Abdel Nassar, Nelson Mandela, Augustine Ngom Jua, Pa Abun Tom Dzenchuo, Manu Dibango and other African luminaries. The African continent is the richest in mineral and natural resources, second to none but, ironically, the most impoverished on the planet. And the problems are corruption and the self-centeredness of her leaders, using tribalism and ethnic nationalism, lack of transparency and accountability and the complete absence of democratic standards in the management of her affairs. If the entire African countries� GDPs of less than US $2 trillion can not match that of Great Britain or France or Germany (let alone China or the US)and with the highly industrialized Europe integrating into a powerful economic block, how can the fragmented African economies compete with such mega-economy when she is highly involved in internal wars while her resources fuel the industrialisation of the world! In this respect the poetic medium is a most convenient for me as a Griot visionary to transmit this dream to fellow Africans. It might defy reason to our detractors but man should know that Creator (and there exists a Supreme Being) does not smile with the sufferings and incessant deaths of Africans shipwrecked in the Italian Island of Lampedusa migrating to Europe for a better life, when back home there abound enough mineral and natural resources for their livelihood. Africa needs to industrialise and must be given a permanent seat in the UN Security Council to participate in decisions affecting her destiny. Further still, she has to sell to the world finished products not primary commodities, refraining from AID packages by Europe, America, China, Japan - (help that kills).
The Celestine Glow shall illumine our path to this great providence, a single republic, a destiny beyond the reach of mortal eyes.

Why certain things are certain ways by Joy Etiowo 13/5/2007     

Through high and grad schools, I never liked poetry. Although I was a good student of literature (even as a young girl, I had always wanted to study literature), I never liked the poetry part. I avoided poetry questions in examinations except they were compulsory. However, during my doctoral research, a course in poetry was compulsory and wide reading was involved. In the process, I started liking poetry; every reservation I had about the genre disappeared. I was excited at the discovery of how poetry can carry a creative burden. My poem �Poetry� is a summary of what I am talking about. I realized that so much could be said in few words through the medium, that a novel I had written half-way could be summarized in a single poem. I did not only start writing poetry, I also changed my research focus from novel to poetry.

My poetry is an effort to tell people why certain things are certain ways; that a widely held opinion could have more dimensions to it than people would ordinary think. �The Wounded Heart�, �Stolen Inheritance�, �The Hypocrite�, and �Happiness�, among others, are some cases in point. Again, Mma aims at appreciating institutions and individuals who touched not only my life but that of humanity. And in sharing my appreciation of them, I was hoping that a sense of responsibility, the seed for a better humanity, may emerge. The idea of literary entertainment is also there in such poems as �Zoomed� and �Joy�.

My society could be compared to a child learning to walk today and tomorrow morning decides to crawl, only to attempt running in the afternoon. Policies are not stable; they keep changing depending on the prerogative or interest of policy makers. It is an environment where values are constantly redefined, positively or negatively. The immediacy of the poetic medium is most suitable for me as a poet/scholar in this kind of environment. I can easily move with the �train�. Poetry could be written in the market place, in the church, in the bus, anywhere. In fact, I have written poetry while receiving visitors or while doing some chores in the kitchen. A whole experience could be summarised in one line or even in a word and this means so much to a poet like me in this kind of society.

a train of thought�one brief recollection of both lived and imagined experience in a universe of diverse dreams.

� Chin Ce

makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own.

-Dylan Thomas

a poem is discovering.

-Robert Frost

the priest of the invisible.

-Wallace Stevens

at bottom, a criticism of life.

-Matthew Arnold

its own sole freshly-created universe.

-Philip Larkin

like a piece of ice on a hot stove...rid(ing) on its own melting.

-Robert Frost

hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows' -Percy Bysshe Shelley

like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

-Don Marquis

the one who carries the light bulb.

-Bob Dylan

a certain type of wisdom... a way of reading the world, and writing in it a better world.

-Mia Couto

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