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THE emergence of a younger school of poetry with distinguishing temperaments
from the new Nigerian counterparts was a welcome development for Nigerian
writing. In spite of the dogged inventiveness of these bards within the new
tradition, critics had set off the usual comparisons between old and
emerging tendencies. But if there was any artistic distinction in the
newcomers from their contemporaries, the better promise was laid in the
expressive power which lifts their presumptuous craft into what, a few
decades now, might prove a more credible testimonial of the times.
Assertions: The Changing Paradigm
The younger poets speak from very deep convictions, not tongue-in-cheek, but
boldly, clearly and with less ambiguity. This paradigm of poetic anchorage I
have called the Assertions. As divergent as they come with their opinions on
every aspect of life, they sound much like ideologues with whom the faithful
may find a mutual and convivial association. Yet their purpose, as may be
stated, is not so much again to highlight distractive and discordant tunes
of ideological war songs and fervent politicking as to unify the diverse
manners of expression or individual ways of assertion, the expression of the
�I� in extension. Here, poetry is the focal point. Attitudes toward
circumstances of the times mark interesting points of individuality; their
faith is committed only to that imagination with which they fashion worlds
on hills beyond the rising sun.
The younger Nigerian poets are able to achieve this psychic poise, where
nothing can throw them off their course, or where doctrines are not worth
the sacrifice of a busy schedule, all because of an inner calm. The poet
must develop a personality sufficiently stable in the stress and strain he
must inevitably meet. Of course, he is free to sing or be all that he has
chosen. He may be the extremist whose whispers whip werewolves like wasps,
or she may become the revolutionary demanding justice amidst squandered
hopes, yet with a will that cannot be broken as easily as the beating
inflicted on him for the sake of his unyielding quests. Yes. He (or She)
may, as well, become the chronicler of yester-pillage by modern political
brigands, or the recorder of the pitiful howling of fallen roofs.
All these assertions are germane to his conscious experience, because he has
been, and still is, part of that society where pugilist overlords deal
merciless blows on the people forcing the poet to cry out: �What is the
meaning of this aimless business?� He has witnessed the madness of this
society where everyone fervently pleads to be saved from one and the other
self.
So how does he feel?
Sometimes his voice roars from the bellies of dark jungles and the shackles
of iron cabins to the four posts of existence, screaming blood, freedom and
vengeance. His actions are dramatised successively in leaps and bounds
devoid of hidden eloquence. Yet eloquent are his words; they represent some
shining exemplar of virtue despite the virulent scourge of vice. He is the
artiste making his own musical notes out of the word as surely as the critic
must weave his own foray from out the same word. His own notes are vibrant,
pulsating words; they are songs of freedom and innocence when all barriers
are broken and experience is the single teacher of life�s lessons in love
and laughter.
This song of innocence is thus an assertion of the purity of the soul
unbound, not obliterated in the yawning void where danger lurks ready to
close its jaws on the wary trespasser. With maturity, innocence grows into
knowledge, and with knowledge an increase in poetic sensitivity. He had
assumed an identity to champion the cause of change against the stagnation
of his times. He had imbibed the spirit of coordinated action, becoming the
fury of his placid age, the courage of his gutless era, the rage of his
storm-less sea. This motivating challenge to his generation is imbued with
the ferocity that dissolves mountains. The secret of success lies in seeking
avenues and ways through limitations not really imposed by nature but, more
significantly, arranged to stir the current of awareness that would jolt us
into self-becoming, self-confidence and self-assertion, as they concur.
Thus the impertinence of the younger generation of Nigerian poets is not
ended at all. If anything it has widened in dimensions of contempt or sheer
distrust for the prevailing status quo. For Marxist thought, it was a
dialectical and historical materialist struggle. For the poet of the new
generation, the struggle more significantly, more psychically, must reflect
in the subordination of the base, for the higher, self.
Within this divide is contained the greed and materialism of both worlds.
Often our anger is made to becloud these to give them a bent of dignity. So
the business of greed that informs that scoundrel system that our national
flag hides is equally comparable in scope of criminality � and deserving of
interdiction � to, say, those energetic hands of our public servants who go
to grab, cheaply, pay packets for work they never did. Both symptoms fuel
the growing decadence of the age. Thus when these criminals come with
pretended messages and promises of a better life in the name of politics,
the poet can see through all the hype. He helps us to wear our suit of
armour against such onslaughts upon our intelligence when he adopts a mien
full of contempt and scorn for the perpetrators of this crime. In the warped
thinking of failed leaders, for example, success is measured against the
heights of their sky scrapers and the impregnability of their fortresses and
security zones. Beef them up with grenades, the poet mocks; hide the truth
with scrapers that touch the clouds. The local military and civilian
surrogates of the rapacious West are natural targets for poetic scorn. The
people�s response is not just out of righteous indignation, as they are
often wont to phrase it, but comes in red hot spleen.
The poetic interdiction is against all those responsible for stifling the
human essence. Humankind is both the pitiable victim and the cowardly
aggressor. It does not matter if the one has grabbed the reins of power and
amassed the political machinery for his personal benefit, or if the other is
the frenetic armchair revolutionary scheming, and generally bidding his
time. He may be a part of that faceless throng of a no-nonsense mob rallied
for the heinous murder of probably another of his ilk rather unfortunate to
be caught in the act. And when he has done his judgment with the tyre, he is
there when they wear the ordure frost on faces that glimpse never the faded
silhouette of modern opulence. He is also there struggling among the upward
social class to reach the top, and he must also come down among the
spectators absorbed in the throwing of fists at the crude antics of those on
the other side pushing to the front. But is it not the irony of human nature
that for all our plodding, nightfall overtakes us at dawn? It is all
pettiness and vanity; it is all a wasted effort! they scream. But who dares
hold the fire of the burning sun? Nature, unperturbed, stares with mockery
at history�s fallacies. And as the earth rolls on its own infallible course,
it comes with tomorrow and other revelations � from that permanent
impermanence of states and conditions that terrorises the fool and his
ignorant men.
It not just history that bears out the wisdom of the poetic assertions and
interdiction; it is our perception of it � our limited partisan perspectives
that finally reduce us to both victim and villain. The bard who is true to
himself wants to be neither. He may afford to indulge in bouts of depression
as well as flights of fancies. The world to him is that stage in which the
drama of the absurd is enacted. People belong to the passing show. His
visage is therefore ever-changing: snarling, jeering, amused, mocking, and
always the aloof observer. Sometimes he is the clown who mimics himself.
Other times, and rather crudely though, he jeers at the ugly faces of
pimple-clustered sheet of eczema coats on our faces. Curiously, like the
loud and vulgar preacher on TV too, his visage seizes upon morals: he yells
about aborted blood kicking in the flowing streamlets of gutters.
Some poems may sound high-pitched in calumny but deliberate caricature of
rabid xenophobia and the ignorance that witnessed petty tyrants decree the
death on poets, or of that order of racial and cultural supremacists � the
plundering wolf-gang of a blundering world. How about the fate of two
applicants, one a gaily, pretty pearl, the other, brain and degree. What is
it that would motivate the rating of her gait and face as worth more than
his brain and books in the thwarted markets of the private sector? Is it
also the strange logic that entrenched the clause of �state-of-origin� in
national administration and, in some parts of this country, placed the
Pakistani in the position of judge of which Nigerian face constituted a
non-indigene? It is significant to our poetry that no political system (in
addition to those who would masquerade as champions of human rights) will
bother to take a serious look at these and other little but highly important
issues of tribal existence under one nation. It is thus important in our
themes to have the perpetuation of corruption and bribery in many corridors
of national power.
When the poets dissect these absurdities, they are compelling to some form
of action people complacent in their own malaise, nose turned like the
he-goat's, inhaling from putrid social wastes that do not better their
conditions. Because our professed love for one another, both as individuals
and nationalities, is like the spider's for the fly. The younger poets show
they are never aloof towards these �mini-minded� attitudes which, littering
the streets like Nigeria�s mountains of rubbish, constitute eyesores
curiously passed for modernity and civilization. The irony lies in matching
the permissiveness of modern society with ours. There are some comic
dimensions about our prodigal nationhood just as some attempts at pidgin
seek to achieve unequivocal 'grassroots' communication. We can unravel the
political innuendoes and comprehend the subtle contempt the poets hold for
the penchant of indirection in our local, state and federal governments�
policies. And this is not a matter for cheap �Onitsha-market� chap books
alone. The task before us, in committing words and ideas to paper, can only
be achieved by conscious artistic discipline, and it must be understood from
that parameter. It does not even accept a second place situation.
Frontliners and Visionaries
Like soldiers at the frontline, the younger poets have chronicled the
crumbling of such obnoxious systems as the apartheid regime of South Africa
and the pristine capitalism of the emerging right wing elites. For
apartheid, the resistance of its right-wing conservatives was but the
lashing of a parasite whose fate, quicker than his puny struggles for
survival, everyone had rather liked to be sealed for the greater good. Some
poets here were writing in the dying days of that regime when momentum had
long gathered in the direction of change sweeping through Africa and her
Southern neighbours. To call them Frontliners here is in tribute to the
spirit of African resistance in the face of imperial forces that threaten
humanity�s survival on the planet. The downtrodden may only suffer for some
time but the spirit ripples underneath every fragment of human effort. Even
so, their suppression is only a matter of imposition within the physical
realm.
We posit that freedom is a much more ethereal force belonging only in the
realms where the essence of life is hence identified with the universal
source of all things. Thus seeking expression in the crude regions of
matter, space and time, it is but the pale reflection of that essentially
unstoppable divine character which will, and must, prevail despite the
circumstances of tyranny under which it is made to battle. The flaming wing
of the eagle is freedom sped by justice; and from the ashes and brickbats of
the violence, we can hear the cry of our spirit, pursuing its will,
inspiring the song of the victim. The younger poets have discarded the
sordid evidence of diabolical tortures and genocide which are hallmarks of
chauvinist Boer and African governments. How beautiful the cry of freedom
then sounds in the poet's ears. He is the cornerstone, the gold dust, the
star in the garden swinging to freedom when the gates must have been opened
with triumphal songs. The frontline is the poetic passage of history. It is
a song for the roofless, recording the evidence of years of deprivation
where, for instance, people eke out a living in thick standing papers and
wooden racks, clamouring for a solid shrine to gather their scattered,
battered lives. This is the picture of the world�s governing elites that
have no housing policy for the people save for themselves, and acute is the
pain of it. At the frontline, the poets record the mood of fighters. It is
one of angst toward their leaders at the home front who had screamed thus at
apartheid: �End racial discrimination!� while denying their suffering people
even the barest means of survival.
The frontline poets warn of consequences. There are consequences of our
greed, they tell us, which often take entirely unpredictable dimensions. It
is nature�s vengeance on tyrants who have no place in the dawn when galleys
would not exist and where crops grow on common hills and valleys. If this
latter assertion is an indulgence in poetopia, we find in the poet's inner
conviction a statement of human triumph which stands against the opposing
tendency toward despondency where the heart wills but is yet manacled, and
where finally desolation is total.
The younger poets are visionaries of that which keeps man brimming with
inspiration to brave the hardy. Theirs is not from the idle religion of the
fanatic mapping out large portions of geographic disaster for �infidels� or
�unbelievers� of his doctrine. Their seeing is rather of the constant
experience of life; they are the vigilant observers who have come to note
the pattern in the overall course of human destiny, a pattern such as that
even-handed justice that commends the poisoned chalice to the owner�s lips,
for instance � or that which excavates the ghosts of our secret crimes to
stand face to face before us at the border of the unknown.
In this pattern is hidden the secret of African wisdom, of ancient riddles
yet unanswered. They dare the brave and courageous to taste of it and swoon
in the forest of thousand daemons where truth kernels abound. Needless to
say it is a creative effort, not the cult-like ablution associated with some
initiation in obscurant depths. When poets become artistes on the sketch
board of life, their imagination lifts them above the world of mundane, of
rigid rules and stereotypes, to that fluid and formless state where strokes
and strokes can make impressions of joy and myriad possibilities.
This creative talent is like the tree whose fruits have ripened more
bountifully with sublime joy. Sometimes it can be a haunting feeling
captured in a quest, a light like a blazing fire, and the trail is lost when
the mind balks at the immense possibilities that stand before it. It leaves
that nostalgic feeling of something lost, exteriorised in our mutual parting
of ways, as in a discovery, or a simple good night bidding to a loved one.
The poet walks the narrow lonely road of the world and only he knows the dew
of sorrow that haunts his inner being reflected in his exterior world of
inter-personal relationships to which poetry aligns the vision. For one
point, after all the regurgitations of mere intellectual knowledge of past
masters at our own illuminated expense, we shall come to the point where we
can rekindle the beam of true enlightenment. Will the redeeming hope
expressed here supplant the boundless cruelty of despotic governments in the
truest sense? When the lagging rope is burnt after the executioner�s gun
blast, what will be left of cruel laws, of gaols and human rights nailed on
the cross of judicial travesties? Or, as some have asked, what comes out of
goal gobbled when clouds overtake the sun to steal the beautiful reflections
in the mirror of our world?
There have been visions of war, thousands of cries echoed, and freedom lost;
dreams of toxic deaths, and of the frustrations of climbers of the social
mountain moaning and fawning in that manner that is the bane of the African
elite. Self-spoilt and pampered, he had followed the allure of his
nimble-footed white friends made in the modern wake of history. Deceived, he
is abandoned to his own wits, and alone, is unsure of himself. The idea of
mountain climbers as a parable of an African dilemma re-echoes the
indictment against blind leaderships and the popular herd syndrome of their
followers. One who has come to envision this becomes like soul at the peak
of consciousness moulding dreams far above the crowded streets below. Upon
the heights the vision is sharp, acute and reaches even beyond the times. It
is then the prayer of the poet that no limitations should fetter the
imagination. In such contemplation, silence is the thread upon which the
thoughts run to stir in him the current of awareness and understanding. Here
we seem to be treading towards the mystical and profound, which lies not
merely in the words that form the tool of verbal communion but in the
flowering rhythm of inner meaning. The poet is in communication with his own
eternity, so to speak, because the image is more ethereal, more permanent;
it belongs in the realms where space and time collapse and the dreamer is
ecstatic about the discovery of whatever he had sought.
Dreams are thus the living image in the centre of the eye. We long for that
eye of eternity in which lies the power that lifts the veil over all secrets
and lays bare the shoddy crimes in the chambers of mind. The song bird is
let free, let to roam over the whole world of consciousness. The tongue of
the bard is loosened likewise, free with the power of expression, because he
is communicating an essence that touches the very core of being, reaching
beyond words, mere symbols, beyond the body which belongs to the world of
matter. The mysteries appear to fade, for no longer is he a child of the
world staring with rose-coloured eyes and crawling behind time; rather he
rises beyond space and time, and true knowledge is revealed, mysteries
understood. The morrow is no longer bound with a thick fog for this is the
product of the mind of space, matter and time. But listening into the
shadows and taking the lonely route of realization, he discovers himself.
Friends are gone, and what is left to do is to play the game of silence
which hides the wisdom of his being. He learns that shadows don't hurt.
Instead there is the discovery of what is in the word, the word that had
sung the fame of great men and women and bubbled in minds tortured by social
limitations. The word turns him restless and often drives him to strange
deeds, such as committing suicide on a rope, shooting self in a hotel room,
or making a pact with alcohol. It is clear then that he does not have any
diplomatic (or artistic) immunity against the heat and cold, the comforts
and wants of existence in the world. But if it is the outside world we know
that he sings of, then there will always be hunger and war, hatred and evil.
Because it is a world of greed and pride, of sadness and contentment, lust
and vanity. It seems then a foolish attachment to a world of myriad
illusions for man to think that he can amass every inconceivable possession
and actually identify his being with these fleeting products of material
fancy. His physical body may be heading to the grave but his amnesiac mind
does not even want to contemplate this. Frantically he runs to the cosmetics
and paraphernalia that sustain the illusion of physical prowess. But for the
bard, death bound is home bound. Has he caught life's thread of continuity
beyond so real to our ancestral lords and kin? Is that why he proclaims rest
not in peace against that commonly touted yet meaningless pronouncements by
graveyards? With such a visioning comes knowingness, like the seed, buried
in the womb of the earth and blooming into life. As the poet I know this by
going within that silence where nothing is lost but the fears and
frustrations that tie the mind to the impermanent world, and I declare: the
tunnel of death ends at the gate of life.
Love, Nature and Sweet Remembrances
Now how about the eternal subject of love that has baffled tyrants and
amused sages for generations? The subject of love is the attempt to recover
the gallant chivalry of poetry in a world reduced to a mere materialistic
equation. Consider the child's reminiscence of that age of the cradle hands
clasped around mother's, ear rested between her breasts evoking a tenderness
perfect with mother and child. Or the boundless love of God for man as in
the rhapsody: �See! Your tears are in my bottle stored, and when you grieve
and feel distraught, my love fails not to flow... .� Love is also the
paternal exhortation to a new born baby, or the love of friends epitomised
in those giggles of long-gone years ringing in the loving heart. It is the
crown the mate of the goddess may wear when deepest yearnings are filled and
reaching to heavenly heights. Nothing could ever hinder these reflections as
does the poet by the lamp side. It renews the dream, it is the warmth in the
night that the poet edifies in his love verses. Even the doctrine of sin can
find a hope of remedy in this love, symbolised in the sun whose rays
brighten the days of gloom. Yet love, the poet shows, can be a refuge for
the hypocrite, his rationalisations and monumental deceits. This latter
sense of disillusionment is part of the general paradox. Love is sought even
in the dream of a soul mate where any affair, for the poet, becomes like
truancy in infancy, no longer needed within the circle of perfect harmony
that comes with graduation.
And love is ambiguous. Its ambiguity is of a kind built on language and
mind. But it is one that may be transcended when all fears are pushed back
and hope is allowed to assimilate the meaning of the message framed with
care. The poets of these verses are, thankfully, seeking to lend verbal and
auditory expressions to thoughts and visions that normally seem like
idealism � proving that rabid materialism has not totally swept our
generation away. To be regained here is the true sensitivity which, even
when piteously quixotic in modern times, truly ennobles our lives. In
seeking the well-being of others we imbibe the timeless virtue of loving
care. So the young poet asks: What is as strong as love? rhetorically, for
the unseen force that shapes lives and gives a few men the courage to do
invincible deeds, heal unhealable wounds and cure incurable sores. It is the
power beneath the swift�s endless flight, and the graphic play of bowers in
flight, and the dance of the lek birds so cooly, so unhurriedly. Love is the
rare bird with bright colours. It is nature in motion, lost to mundane and
artificial perceptions; but now recovered in the picturesque imagination of
poetry, the scope and meaning is most unquantifiable in simplistic terms.
Yet its persistence, despite its elusiveness in the circumstances that force
us to part from our beloved, is transcended by hope and faith. To be fondled
and admired forever, or to be given a name; to be free, depends upon the
enduring hope and faith of love. Like the candle that kindles the light of
knowledge, love illuminates all doubts and dark corners of the soul. It
glows with excitement; it throws beautiful patterns on floors and walls. Its
essence is like the water of life which flows to sustain life in every
universe; and without it, what calamity, what hazards and disaster and doom
would befall mankind; how could we face the world without it?
As in his love, the poet's sympathy to nature is a widening of the scope of
poetic inspiration which is more than just Romanticism. Indeed this is, if
anything, the age of materialism where every value is being eroded in the
survivalism wrought by global preying on human and natural resources. But
still the poet may fantasise on the moon or rain in a manner of imagination
that cannot be interpreted within the theoretical stream. Even if his
purpose is to experiment with word and sound, the splash and slash, the
slushing and cascades, the rush and bubble and rumbling and babbling are
creative attempts to translate the auditory and the visual into strong,
almost palpable reality.
Let the rainbow be an inspiration of wonder hiding the secrets of ancient
wisdom and the puzzle of positive, negative and neuter elements of the
universe. Such too is the nature of the stars that their luminous smiles
around the galaxies operate on realms beyond the ignorance of the seeing and
blind. What other secrets lie behind this calm composure of an unfailing
cycle of nature? What truths do nature and creation endow the heart that
experiences its bliss? Our love for nature would ultimately lead us to that
longing for the childlike state wherein beauty and the grace of intuition
and joy, explicit joy, all become the temperament from which our emotional
fabric may always be cut.
We can learn from the nightingale, singing the same tone as ever, a fidelity
that even a preacher may never have. A consistency in the peace, love, and
sweetness of nature is reflected in lunar tenderness and gracefulness. Thus
it is not an act of ordinary emotion to ejaculate about nature so good,
nature so kind. Rather it is an awakening to higher truth, recognising the
infallibility of nature�s order in all things. How close our perception, or
how keen our perceptiveness, depends on our different levels of awareness.
It can be as keen as the poet admiring the cyclic regeneration which
permeates all life including the many countless wide ripples in nature and
existence. This philosophical dimension of poetic perception suggests
another look at the other end of the scale, the negative aspect of the
rainbow which tends to fight the other side of nature so harmonious and
peaceful. Indeed, there's two to life, as poets tell � even when they
complement or seem to negate: the storm and the calm. The purpose, as may be
seen, is to find a balance at the point where the poet calls the middle
bearer.
Poetry is the eye of reminiscence, and a complex one too. The poet is
involved in a kind of introspection, a communication with his own self and
the extension of this self as reflected in others with whom he shares mutual
experience. He may be reaching out into his box of memories as far back as a
little incident of childhood, recalling the feelings, the mood of that
singular moment in no mean feat with words. For those dramatic incidents of
life, which jolt us out of complacency and leave a permanent imprint, like a
scar, upon our subconscious mind, may appear incomparable in inner depth and
significance with that subtle, very normal incidents that had been long
overlooked but now unearthed in the mind's screen when looked upon with the
eye of the moment. A fresh insight is gained, the lessons subtler and
thrilling to discover; its discovery more than measures our present growth:
point B against that previous stage of history: point A. It could open up a
wider frontier of viewpoints for understanding of our own self, our
experiences, our associations, our loves and hates. The spiritual
realization that may accompany this experiencing is in every way limitless.
What is that force that pulls strangers together in a definite place and
bids them interact like old friends? Had they really met before in a distant
time; is that parting a re-enactment of a some experience in the dim past
and which must recur in some future with that timed mathematical ordering of
the universe?
What is it that we harbour in our memory-bag of history? A life of distant
years which remembrance may be triggered by the most casual events and
actions as in the flight of a bird? A poet's land of red soil where
homesteads clustered together and lizards moved in their pairs? Such a land
of laughter, hunting and merriment often haunts us with its romantic
symmetry. This re-experiencing of memory, these reminiscences, would unearth
subtleties of emotional states when contrasted with harsh physical
realities: anger at the rude awaking of a nation by idle military
adventurers or indignation at the invasion of the peace of a continent and
subsequent imposition of alien values on a people � that flagrant violation
of personal spaces � in what has been called colonialism and, in religion,
evangelism.
Memory is history, yet a more intense kind of history. Its re-experiencing
focuses the attention and magnifies the feeling to the extent and degree of
our focusing. Thus the pangs of SAP, that symbol of our economic slavery,
had marked the time of dogs and registered the insipidity and lifelessness
that trailed our poverty and corruption in its most monumental scale. In
Nigeria, SAP was that promise unfulfilled, leaving the masses dying before
the promised recovery of market laughter. SAP or SFEM: a negative
inspiration for poetry. Its vaunted acronym was shown to be essentially
depressing and the poet does not relent in pointing this out. Under SAP all
remains of nationhood was sapped in oblivion, leaving a deep trail of
cynicism and hopelessness. Lying and still running in the projector of the
poet's mind are the skulls of souls silenced on the acrid journey to the
altar of power. And like SAP, Koko came to symbolise the indolence of a
nation under the illusion of its size and military strength which it
foolishly turns on its own citizenry. Here was a nation caught napping when
huge drums of toxic waste were being imported and dumped on its soil.1
Issues of national significance did not pale with the reality of private
experiences within which had lain the hope that the cries of yester years
may fade far into the dying flames. The lost emerald of hope is regained at
last. In fact within the personal world lies a stretch of possibilities �
love and mutual giving of self, travel and adventure, meeting and parting,
places distant, strange treeless lands and deserts, friendships made,
cherished, and friendships lost after the parting.
The human truth in these experiences makes for their reality, the deeper
significance appealing to the humanity within our universal essence. For
instance, how does the poet succeed in evoking an ironic feeling of
nostalgia in the poem of the �been-to� living �in a kind of quarters�? We
can enjoy the soft rhyming of the lines and the philosophical contemplation
which endows truth upon what may have been a mere subjective escapade.
Let us concede that life consists of these many journeys. Through the many
different planets, continents and worlds men and women have travelled,
crossed many waters and bridges, traversed space and journeyed in time. Each
experience leaves a definitive stamp, an image, and like a screen-sheet
filled and stacked with them, they haunt us with their grim and grotesque
distortions. Our recall of them comes in parts, and it comes to take the
unconscious shapes of our own nature. It could be the smoking chimneys in
the harmattan mist. Here the tool of perception is, as always, the poetic
sensibility. The couch heading up North assumes a snaky steady strain
mingling in the oratory of commercials and vistas of living greenery and
parched yellow plumes. What brotherly flight of fancy links this rhythm to
the Negro gospel? And what imagination metamorphoses the rocks of Jos
plateau into bare backs of crouching giants, grim monarchs hunched in
colloquium? We capture the hoary transport crisis in Lagos, and Onitsha
creates a picture of people who build their powers on pillars of pain
beating limitations to make their millions. The journey takes us to Abuja
and to Umuahia where it evokes an invitation to a war that had been fought
and ended: Umuahia, once the capital of Biafra, home town of Aguiyi-Ironsi,
one of Nigeria's murdered leaders like Balewa and Mohammed before and after
him. We traverse Lagos once again, the commercial nerve centre, Nigeria's
New York and repository of a fearfully tumultuous traffic lagoon. The image
resonates in the pattering of raindrops in that crowded city. In our
journey, thoughts are meteors, events comets which seem to take us to our
destination even before the blink of an eye.
Sometimes visualising can really become tactile. It is like transcending the
limitations of the present and entering into that state which is visualised
and finding inside it a reality that is irrefutable to the experience.
Here in this collection we are also witnesses to a few nursery poems. In the
past it had appeared that the nursery was a less creative activity than the
general themes that deal with social conditions. The question of profundity
had tended to be exaggerated, so also the indulgence in obscure poetry. What
concerns the poet of nursery is the peculiarity with which familiar themes
are expressed, their general lucidity and lyricism. Nowhere are these
qualities exemplified than in these poems where a pattern of repetitions and
parallelism, very familiar in oral poetry, is experimented with striking
effect. There is some a kind of entertainment in the rhetoric which, though
simple, does not suggest naivete � the charge of chauvinists for the complex
and mystical. Nor must rhyming be forced. Rather to flow without
exaggeration or inducement is the candid deal. Consider the straight
assertiveness of some lines of �Going to School� and �Gentle Birds.� In
marking a little spot for the child audience, the editor has rightly
considered that poetry can essentially assume the auditory medium of
expression which can stimulate greater interest by the virtuous arrangement
of verbal and other sound effects, and, at the same time, remain accessible
to the sensitivity of the truly younger generation to leave a lasting legacy
for the future times.
And so here, in the assertions of the younger poets, here, in the art of the
new generation of Nigerian poets, we have become frontline men and women...
and visionaries... and lovers of all that may be true of all ages, among all
nations, all races, all cultures the world over. Here then lies the art of
the younger poets.
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