The pristine past,the plundered present: Nature as lost home in Tanure Ojaide’s poetry

Abstract

Tanure Ojaide is a major voice of post-war Nigerian poetry in English, distinguished by his recourse to the orature of his birthplace. Ojaide takes orature as a locus of an aesthetics that is cognizant of the arts and politics of rural people, especially in the face of a modernity-driven, viperous establishment. His poetry’s dependence on orality, I argue, implies its rootedness in nature. But far more crucial to this article is the contention that nature in Ojaide’s poetry is not merely evoked as an aesthetic strategy — an embellishment of what many have regarded as an overwhelming political theme in his poetry. Nature (the natural environment, biodiversity, flora and fauna) is also thematized as home — now a lost home in the face of modernity and petrodollar global capitalism. In the context of postcolonial ecocriticism, I attempt a reading of his poetry to point out that the nature (environment) of the Niger Delta region where the poet hails from is, just like the people inhabiting it, a victim of exploitation and oppression caused by large-scale oil exploration in the region; and it is no longer the pristine home it used to be.

Introduction

Tanure Ojaide came into the Nigerian literary scene in 1973 with the poetry collection Children of Iroko, and soon became known, alongside two of his contemporaries Odia Ofeimun and Niyi Osundare, as one of the three leading poets of post-war Nigerian literature. The poetry of this trio, as a number of literary scholars (Aiyejina, 1988; Alu, 2001; Amuta, 1988; Okunoye, 2004) have noted, raised a strident political tenor in the period immediately after the Nigerian Civil War, which reflected the contradictions informing the war and the human and material wastes attendant to it. Ojaide has therefore been among many Nigerian poets whose works are products of a political poetics that instrumentalizes the art of poetry, that sees itself as a cultural discourse against institutional powers, and that imagines a just and democratic society. A distinctive dimension in Ojaide’s poetry, as in Osundare’s, is the aestheticization of orality, the privileging of birthplace narrative, and a persistent connection conveyed through local images and symbols between the poet and his homeland. Ojaide is of the Urhobo ethnic nationality mainly located in Delta State in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. Urhobo orature remains a pool from which he taps, and on which he constantly relies for his artistry. J. O. J. Nwachukwu-Agbada is of the view that Ojaide’s “employment of oral tradition […] is a clear testimony of his cultural nationalism” (2000: 88). And in a sustained analysis of Ojaide’s use of orality Ogaga Okuyade concludes that Ojaide deploys orality as a poetic strategy to, among other aims, fulfil “his declared solidarity for the plight of the people by returning to an art form anchored in the thought and speech-patterns of [his] people” (2012: 48). My concern in this article is to appropriate the poet’s organic reliance on his birthplace orality as a strategy of an ecocritical reading that unpacks the idea of nature as home. This is possible with the invocation of a pristine past, of a blissful pre-industrial life, central to his use of orality. Crucial to his poetics is the contrast between the past and the present, and in this contrast is the ambivalent troping of nature as home, comfortable and salutary before the emergence of technology-driven oil exploration, but now ruined and devastated by the force of exploitation driven by the petrodollar.

To understand this framing, that is, reading Ojaide’s poetry as a romantic recuperation of a lost past, is not to undermine the other important strand of his eco-poetry, namely the aggressive discourse against the global capitalism behind the environmentally destructive oil extraction in South Nigeria. My reading of his poetry here is therefore informed by the notion that the romantic and the protestant can mingle together such that the poet, on the one hand, is recalling the lost nature, his home, and, on the other hand, is confronting the technological processes responsible for its loss. This enables the poet to invoke the past in depicting the present, a strategy that sharpens the contradictions informing his poetry as a discourse against institutional powers responsible for the despoliation of the region. The conclusion reached is that Ojaide is as much a poet of nature as he is a poet of protest, a conclusion tessellating with one of the main propositions of postcolonial ecocriticism, namely that the protest writing of postcolonial nations such as Nigeria has never really left the concerns of the environment behind.

Nature, the Niger Delta, and the postcolonial condition

The concerns of nature, of environmentalism, have never actually been divorced from the concerns of postcolonial nationhood. The two have been intertwined in African literature since its inception. Pioneer African poets such as Gabriel Okara, Kofi Awoonor, and Okot P’Bitek, among others, have relied heavily on nature in representing the tension perceived and experienced in the contact of African and European cultures. Traditionalism, a concept that has, for some poets and writers, come to form the core of African aesthetics, has as one of its vital dimensions the writer’s sense of place. Pioneer African poets had to engage in self-fashioning to gain legitimacy in a world of letters dominated by European voices and philosophies; and in doing so their profound sense of place, their self-consciousness, self-interpretation, and self-staging as oracles of their birthplaces ¹ undergird their poetic imagination. Consequently, the poet’s aesthetic rendition, as Ojaide himself posits in Poetic Imagination in Black Africa: Essays on African Poetry (1996), is tied to his or her immediate environment, a practice for which, as I pointed out above, Ojaide and Osundare are well known. Having an organic link to his birthplace offers Ojaide first-hand knowledge about the fate of his people and their environment. The biodiversity (humans, animals, plants, soils, waters, and so forth) of the Niger Delta have suffered death and are being continuously, severely, threatened since the exploration of crude oil in the region in the 1950s. Ojaide’s struggle, through his writing, to historicize this phenomenon, to expose and protest the harms done to his homeland, and, most importantly, to constantly hark back to the period before oil exploration when the land experienced peace, constitute his poetics of nature as lost home.

The connection between the fate of the people and that of nature is the preoccupation of what has emerged as postcolonial ecocriticism. The connection is central to “a set of new resources and questions” (McLeod, 2016: 192) that have come to underscore the studies of postcolonial environments. In the view of John McLeod,

[a] growing body of purposeful postcolonial scholarship is transporting the wisdom of environmentalism to postcolonial debates about power, dispossession, neo-colonialism and creative critique, and is attending insistently to the problems of anthropocentrism, ecocide and/as genocide, disaster and recovery (always human-made, never “natural”). (2016: 192)

While noting the “seemingly insurmountable problems” (2010: 2) in fusing the concerns of the two fields of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin contend that “what is probably most needed is not the capacity to think beyond the human [i.e. jettisoning anthropocentrism], but the courage to imagine new ways in which human and non-human societies, understood as being ecologically connected, can be creatively transformed” (2010: 215). The eco-writing of Nigeria has long mapped its course as one that encompasses both “human and non-human societies”, as we will clearly see in the poetry of Ojaide. His literary activism against the destructive power in his homeland is aimed at seeking the liberation of the constantly injured environment, but also the liberation of the human beings that inhabit the environment.

Postcolonial ecocriticism offers a theoretical context for a broad-based critique of environmental issues as an organic part of socio-political and cultural issues in postcolonial narratives. Both postcolonialism and ecocriticism are fields of studies that advocate what one might see as political action in pursuance of justice, social and environmental, because, as Bonne Roos and Alex Hunt point out, “the forms of justice — environmental, economic, and social — intersect” (2010: 4). Postcolonial ecocriticism therefore “emphasises the similarities between the two fields of scholarship in term[s] of a sense of political commitment, interdisciplinarity, and the interrogation of capitalist development and progress” (Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, 2011: 3). It is important to note that ecocriticism emerged as a field of literary and cultural studies in Euro-America. Its central thesis is, however, of a global appeal and, although earlier studies in the field had tended to ignore issues of environmentalism and its representation in postcolonial societies, the merging of postcolonial concerns and those of ecocriticism in what is now known as postcolonial ecocriticism has attracted enthusiastic and fruitful studies of how postcolonial societies in Africa have had to contend with environmental issues arising from the abuse of the environment. Theorists and critics working within the framework of postcolonial ecocriticism must therefore consistently focus on and emphasize how the field can be “more responsive to historical relationships of power, to colonial history and its effects, and to cultural difference […] the inextricable intertwining of cultural, political and natural history” (Caminero-Santangelo and Myers, 2011: 5).

The Niger Delta, its cultural, political, and economic permutations, is central to any postcolonial ecocritical reading of Ojaide’s poetry. Ojaide is a poet with a consummate sense of place. His sense of place is anchored in his childhood. He says:

[To] me as a poet, childhood is vital, because it is the repository of memory. That is why the Delta area has been so important to me […]. My Delta years have become the touchstone with which I measure the rest of my life. The streams, the fauna, and the flora are symbols I continually tap. (1994: 15)

As I pointed out earlier, this dependence on not only his childhood memory in the Niger Delta, but also his deliberate aestheticization of the orality of his community gives a distinct edge to his poetry; it is in fact the form, the aesthetic locus, for imagining nature as home. Ojaide’s Niger Delta is truly a troubled one. With the discovery of crude oil in the region in the 1950s, the Nigerian national government turned its attention to the region for national revenue. Up to the end of the twentieth century, monies accruable from the sale of the crude oil in the region amounted to about 90 per cent of Nigeria’s revenue. In spite of the talks of economic diversification in Nigeria in this twenty-first century, it is arguable that revenue generated from the sale of crude oil is still up to 70 per cent of Nigeria’s annual income. What is appalling, though, is that with this huge revenue coming from the region, there are no commensurate development indices. Idom T. Nyabri traces the economic misfortune of the region to the period of slave trade. “All through the 16th to the early 18th centuries”, he writes, “the ‘city states’ of the Niger Delta from old Calabar to Bonny and Brass served as coastal outposts for the shipment of slaves from within coast and hinterland regions in the western and eastern Delta” (2015: 132). Then came the time of the palm oil trade in the nineteenth century, which led to the exploitation of the land and its people by the British Royal Niger Company. Nyabri sums up by suggesting that “[o]ne must not lost sight of the intricate connection between merchant companies from the period of slavery in the sixteenth century to the discovery of oil in the mid-twentieth century in the Niger Delta” (2015: 134). Thus, the Niger Delta has had a long history of economic exploitations, a fact Philip Aghoghovwia recognizes when he writes: “In the Niger Delta, the oil enterprise inscribes within its sphere of operations a form of globalism akin to a preceding (and, perhaps, continuing) history of European colonial expropriation on the African continent” (2017: 33).

This has led to various forms of agitation mainly from the natives of the region. From the struggles of activists such as Isaac Boro, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Asari Dakubo, among others, the Niger Delta region has gained worldwide attention as one of the most environmentally degraded areas in the world. With the judicial killing of Saro-Wiwa and a heavy military campaign against the protestant people of the region, militancy gained currency and, as Nicholas Shaxson observes, “[m]ilitancy has arguably become the core of what you might call modern Nigerian civil society: an organized response by poor citizens to the depredations of their rulers” (2007: 201). In many ways, the struggles of the people of the Niger Delta are legitimate. Besides inadequate education, the basic necessities of life are grossly insufficient: for example, accessible roads or means of transportation in the creeks of the region are inadequate. There is a high level of unemployment, which was one of the causes of militancy in the 1990s. In addition to this obvious neglect by the government, the environment and its inhabitants (humans, animals, and plants) continue to suffer from gas flares, air and water pollution, oil spillages, pipe leakages, and other things inimical to the survival of the biodiversity in the region. The Nigerian national government and international oil organizations (Shell, Chevron, Texaco, and so on) have been blamed consistently for perpetrating these crimes against the environment and peoples of the region. Shell is often given the largest share of this blame. In their book Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights, and Oil, Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas opine that “[t]he oil-producing communities […] see Shell as the number-one culprit in the economic and ecological war currently being waged against them” (2003: 2). These oil moguls operating almost in a criminal manner in the region are given full protection by the Nigerian national government against the militant groupings that sprang up to confront them. As Nnimmo Bassey puts it, “the Niger Delta was the only part of Nigeria where a special military occupation force, set up by the federal government in 1994 and which had Shell’s support at the time, took over the lives of the people, killing, maiming, and raping thousands” (qtd. in Okonta and Douglas, 2003: xi). Ojaide is one of the many poets and novelists who hail from the region and have over the years become more sensitive to the plight of their land’s biodiversity. These authors’ writings transcend mere aesthetics to pursue a political goal, namely the inauguration of a counter-discourse, through discursive historicism, that openly resists the tendentious development narratives of the federal government and the oil organizations. These authorities consistently and erroneously imply that activists and pressure groups in the Niger Delta are greedy and disgruntled elements bent on sabotaging the development of the region.

Nature as lost home

Ojaide’s poetics of nature has at least two dimensions. First, there is the representation of place, of the environment, as a pristine entity, where and when nature was still uninjured, luxuriant, and offered the best abode for biodiversity; that is, nature as traditionalism and as nativity. Second, is the foregrounding and dramatization of that same nature, now injured and bedevilled by the destructive effects of modernization that have brought large-scale oil exploration and the political intentions underscoring it. It is in this two-dimensional poetics that the imaging of nature as home is located: the past, the pristine entity, being the home always invoked with nostalgia; the present, the injured nature, now being the lost home. You will notice throughout the poems studied here that Ojaide consistently uses the possessive pronouns “my” and “mine” — an indication of his strong filial and organic attachment to his birthplace, to his homeland. This emotional attachment, reinforcing the figuration of home, underscores the almost aggressive passion that runs throughout the poems, and we have a sense of a poet-in-combat attacking institutions, national and multinational, responsible for turning his once pristine home into a place of suffering.

In his Delta Blues and Home Songs (1998), Ojaide takes his readers to the past of the Niger Delta environment, describing the peculiarities of the land, revealing the cultural values attached to the environment, and eventually, in a melodramatic tone, foregrounding the sad ending of all the significant peculiarities and values of the environment. In the poem “When Green Was the Lingua Franca”, the poet presents his childhood in the context of time–space (notice the use of the time adverbial “when”; note also the use of past tense). There was a time in the past when “green”, the nature that is Ojaide’s home, used to be the “lingua franca”, a linguistic term that captures, for the poet, the communal and cultural unity of the people of his land. Green as the lingua franca also implies that the people are one with their environment; they not only understand their environment very well, but also rely (by way of speaking the environment) on the environment for survival since, as the poem makes quite explicit, most of the people are farmers, fishers, and hunters. The relationship that existed between the people and their environment at the time when green was the lingua franca was therefore that of symbiosis, interdependence, whereby the people derived their food and sources of survival from the environment and, in turn, tended the environment and ensured that no harm came to it. Unity between humans and nature is crucial to the central message of this poem, as we see in these lines:

Undergrowth kept as much

alive as overgrowth, the delta

alliance of big and small,

market of needs, arena

of compensation for all…(1998: 13) ²

The poet emphasizes what he says in the lines above after he has given a vivid image of his interesting childhood where all of his activities bring him into contact with nature. He talks of the river in which he and his peers bathe and drink and live on; he speaks of fish, of earthworms, snails, and other animals he encounters every day. He evokes plants, fruits such as grapes, apple, and breadfruit. The first part of the poem therefore gives a clear picture of what a child used to see in his environment in those days when green was the lingua franca, when the Niger Delta was truly a home of comfort and unity — unity not only among humans but between humans and flora and fauna.

The second part of the poem sharply contrasts the picture presented above. The poet does not mince his words in identifying the enemies of nature, those institutions and people responsible for killing the green of his land. It is explicit here:

Then Shell broke the bond

with quakes and a hell

of flares. Stoking a heath

under God’s very behind!

[…]

Explosion of shells to under

mine grease-black gold

drove the seasons mental

and to walk on their heads.

who denied doomed neighbours?

it intensifies with execution

of our very friends; the ogre

closes on every foothold. (13; emphasis in original)

With the use of the capital letter S in “Shell” we know that the poet is referring to the oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell International which is the biggest international conglomerate exploring crude oil in the Niger Delta region. The poet blames the destruction of his green land, of his home of comfort and unity, on the commercial exploration of crude oil in the Niger Delta region. Indeed, Ojaide makes it clear that with the exploration comes “a hell | of flares”, referring to gas flaring which has been the source of nightmares for the biodiversity of the region. He argues that it is not the women using nature for survival, such as cutting down trees for firewood, that have driven “God to the sky’s height”, a way of saying that nature is eluding the community. Instead, it is the activities of the oil corporations that hold full responsibility. The poet also points out, as the last stanza above shows, the manner in which the negative effects of oil exploration have disordered the lives of humans, animals, and plants in the region, this exploration driving “the seasons mental | and to walk on their heads”. Gas flaring, for instance, as many have argued, has made nonsense of the distinction between day and night in the region because the darkness of the night is upended by the consistent flames from the flares. The parallelism established in this poem (the description of the past side by side with that of the present) is seen in nearly all the poems. It is significant as a poetic strategy with which the poet projects the paradox of the Niger Delta being so naturally rich and yet being a place of suffering and victimization for its inhabitants. The riches of the region in terms of its economy and culture have been variously described. Nyabri writes that “As a flood plain, the sedimentary deposits which characterize the area give the Niger Delta a rich alluvial soil which yields food and cash-crops year-round” (2015: 130).

But these riches do not translate into good life for the human and non-human inhabitants of the region, as we see in the poem “Delta Blues” wherein Ojaide presents a paradox: “The inheritance I sat on for centuries | now crushes my body and soul” (21). The inheritance here is his home. The wealth of his home, an endowment of nature in his land, what in fact appears to be a natural part of his existence, has now been turned into the cause of his destruction by people who do not even belong to his land, who are not his kinsmen. In the first stanza of “Delta Blues”, the poet accuses the entire world of watching without doing anything (“the unquestioning world”) while the “delta of [his] birth” (1) is being ravaged, while his home is being taken away from him. The region, the poet states clearly, does not deserve to be abandoned by the world, because it has been hospitable to the world, welcoming different merchants during its pre-oil trade boom:

This home of salt and fish

Stilted in mangroves, market of barter,

Always welcomes others —

Hosts and guests flourished

On palm oil, yams and garri.

This home of plants and birds

Least expected a stampede;

There is no refuge east or west,

North or south of this paradise. (21)

Ojaide’s romantic idea is that the Niger Delta region was a peaceful place for conducting legitimate business in agricultural produce, nationally and internationally, before it faced the destructive effects of oil exploration. This then implies that the poet is not against commercial activities in the delta of his birth — because there are commercial activities, like the ones mentioned above, that benefit his people. Farmers, hunters, and fishermen need to sell their harvests and game. What the poet is clearly against is the large-scale exploration that is invariably harmful to his land and his people. These large-scale explorers he calls “a cabal of brokers | breaking the peace of centuries”, making a mess of the rivers in his land, and polluting “air and soil” (22). As a result,

My birds take flight to the sea;

the animals grope in the burning bush;

head blindly to the hinterland

where the cow’s enthroned.

The sky singes my evergreen leaves

and baldness robs me of youthful years.

these are the constitutional rewards

of plenitude, a small fish in the Niger! (22)

So the place that used to be a home that welcomes merchants, that allows for vibrant business, is now a wasteland where the flora and fauna take leave, where human beings learn to live a different kind of life, having to devise a means of surviving in a wasteland. If nature is home (as I have been arguing), represented by natural elements for sheltering — the green leaves, the green bush, the running river — then what the poet describes here is a lost home, a home burnt by the flares of oil exploitation carried out by global capitalists whom the poem does not shy away from calling names; they are “baron robbers”, they are “uniformed dogs barking | and biting protesters”, an obvious reference to the security agents that harassed people who dare to protest; they are “thieves”, they are also “foreign hang[men]”. In this poem, the voice of Ojaide is the voice of the Niger Delta region, as the poetic persona presents himself as the Niger Delta and recounts his misfortune with the discovery of crude oil in the region. The poem ends with the biting paradox that one’s natural wealth is also the cause of one’s destruction because the wealth attracts merciless invaders who, in taking the wealth by force, do not care what happens to the biodiversity of the region.

The Tale of the Harmattan (2007), Ojaide’s 15^th poetry collection, is full of the aesthetics of nature as home; it stages the drama of a persona returned home having strayed away for reasons of education and better life into the Western world. In each of the poems, the persona appears to have returned to see that things are no longer what they were, his home now destroyed. Through his poetics of nature as home, Ojaide persistently puts forward the notion, highly contestable as it is, that technology and civilization, the types that come with large-scale explorations for creation of wealth, are responsible for the destruction of the homeliness that the Niger Delta offers. The poetic persona is therefore of the view that such technology and civilization must be resisted at all costs, and does in fact see his writing as a cultural struggle in the direction of this resistance. Reading the poems in The Tale of the Harmattan from the perspective of the poetics of nature as home, as lost home, it is useful to start with the poem titled “Lessons from Grandma’s Night-Time School”, a title that calls attention to the traditionalism central to Ojaide’s figuration of nature as home. Here, the persona has a total recall of how lessons are learned during his childhood, stretching to how children are immersed in the cultural values of their community, and a deep romantic appreciation of the entire bucolic environment, complete with its enchanting flora and fauna. Divided into three parts, the first uses the image of a copper coin to make the strong statement that the wisdom of the pre-literate, pre-historic, and of the technologically “uncivilized” society is far more useful to the people than what has come after it in the wake of modernity. The persona says, “I used to throw up a copper coin for head | or tail; it was a simple choice I wanted to make —” (2007: 20). ³ With this method it is easy to “make up one’s mind”; it is easy to take a decision, to know on which side one stands. But the persona hastens to add,

Because we have lost respect for basic things

there is no coin left in a democracy’s dividends

and confusion paralyses the mind’s every move.

Up or down, right or left, blurred direction. (20)

Against Western epistemic notions, the poetic persona here tries to make the point that with democracy there is, rather, paucity of what one might see as native wisdom, leading to unwise people being in control and sinking the society in chaos, so that the kind of society that we have is one that lacks direction. In this premise, the past and the present are, as usual, placed on a parallel level, with a nostalgic invocation of the past as a home of wisdom, of native knowledge of survival, and with a negative framing of the present as lost home, a place of technological destruction.

The second part of the poem moves from the sphere of intellection to that of materialism. Here, we see the traditional occupation of the people in their rural community, one that, for the persona, is certainly far more vital than whatever Western wisdom offers. The persona recalls fishing on streams in his community, “singing to Mami Wata | to bring me boatloads of good fortune from far depths” (20). This occupation used to give him great joy. In the third part of the poem, he concentrates on the general course of life as locals dream big dreams in “landscapes without dust without death”. He gives a picture of a community without troubles, in its natural course:

We wore dirt without rashes, had no fear

of dying though we feared seeing corpses.

Every season feted residents with abundance

and we reciprocated hospitality with offerings;

rites that moved from one grade to another

and made graduates proud of their learning.

Humans and spirits married for love of life;

spouses eschewed insults and court cases.

We reaped bushels of goodwill without effort

because no one ate outside the open gathering —

a morsel multiplied into meals

to sate a thousand stomachs.

We consorted with birds and animals,

communed with plants on fresh draughts

that rain and sunlight provided growth;

no cause for anxiety in the commonwealth. (21)

The communalism and collectivism of the past are fully invoked in the lines above. The unity and trust among the people is boundless, as they eat together, farm together, go to the river together. There is also unity and trust between humans and non-humans (“Humans and spirits married for love of life”), a reference to the animist beliefs central to the pre-industrial life of the region. Writing about the Urhobo people’s deep spiritual link to their land, Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega makes the point that “[t]hey serve family ancestors and gods who are expected to guide and guard the living” (2015: 141). This communal unity, across humans and non-humans, remains the mainstay of the strength and comfort of the people and the biodiversity, imagined as a household in Ojaide’s poetry. The reader is likely to question the facticity of the pristine community Ojaide has painted here, beyond the realm of imagination. What the poet has said about his community above might be too good to be true. But of course this is an imaginative rendition, one that is utterly poetic, whose poetic ingredients consist of exaggerated romanticism. While this is necessary for a poet’s rendition of his patriotism to his homeland in light of the perspective of nature as home that we are discussing here, some might see this as a weakness in the sense that the poet, carried away with his rhetoric of “the past was pristine”, might not consider the reality that there was certainly no community, in the prehistoric era, that did not have internal wrangling and internecine feuds. Very debatable is the implied claim, given the Niger Delta’s heterogeneity, that the communities in the Niger Delta had peace until oil was discovered or until the national government brought in its machineries of oppression. Such claims, as Huggan and Tiffin point out, are perhaps characteristic of activism. They state this with regard to Saro-Wiwa’s narratives:

[the] combination of fable and high moral drama that can be seen in Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical accounts of the Ogoni’s struggle also tends to be replicated in the critical discourse that is applied to them, indicating a general tendency in activist writing towards a theatricalisation of the issues it sets out. (2010: 43)

One can also assume that Ojaide, like most poets who thematize the Niger Delta eco-condition, has the tendency to theatricalize, to exaggerate the drama of, his romantic attachment to his homeland. But this, of course, is not to undermine the issues set out with insistence in his poetry concerning the fate of the Niger Delta region. As I have already pointed out, the region is grossly abused, underdeveloped, and exposed to all kinds of pollution attendant to oil exploration.

One interesting dimension to Ojaide’s jeremiads about the destructive modernization of his preferred natural home is captured in the poem “Priests, Converts, and Gods” in The Tale of the Harmattan. The poetic persona blames religion, in addition to castigating technological exploration, for the bastardization of the cultural values of his homeland, concluding that the combined forces of religion and exploration — both of them products of Western civilization — are responsible for the backwardness of his community. The opening of the poem is ironic and satirical:

Pentecostal converts burnt down the primeval grove —

there, they believed, witches metamorphosed into owls;

they did not even know what animals they had become,

when they were born again, living in self-renunciation. (12; emphasis in original)

Here are natives of the region, who used to practise their traditional religion, becoming Christians, deeply immersing themselves in the new religion through what they call being “born again”, and then destroying the community’s places of traditional worship because they believe witches turn into animals in those places. The poet satirizes their attitude, their actions, calling them animals because, in his view, their attitude towards their community is bestial. In other words, they are not different from those they call animals. In point of fact, the rest of the poem describes, with the usual Ojaidean cynicism, how these converts, instead of adding any values to the community, end up reducing it to a pitiable place. With their kind of religion, communal values are eroded, love of the land is replaced with love of distant places, and the destruction they wish upon the land materializes in the invasion of the land by oil explorers who turn the land into a hell of flares.

In this poem the Christian religion is the harbinger of Western civilization, so that in its wake Western style development replaces the natural way of doing things. But the poet is critical of this development, pointing out that “[the] developers tore down the forest that covered us | with green foliage, trashed the natural canopies” (12). In spite of their promises of education, employment, and a civilized manner of doing things, the poet–persona expresses his disappointment that the natural flow of life in the community is being disrupted. Ojaide’s poetics of nature as home is very critical of any moves, especially new and Western (no matter how progressive), which do violence to the order of things in his home. Conservative in perspective, Ojiade’s sense of home favours the total preservation of the values and structure native to his homeland. So, even when a school is established, and the poetic persona begins his schooling, he declares with a measure of cynicism:

After school I looked out for the public park,

the community of plants and animals, they promised

but they only felled more trees for cemeteries, forbade burials

in homes to confine ghosts to fenced lots and make town safe. (12)

Every developmental move of the civilization that comes with Christianity invariably harms the community. The civilizers base their actions upon the argument that they want to make the community a better place for living — which is why the dead have to be buried in the forest, not at home, to avoid ghosts co-existing with humans. But such decision, usually forced on the community, fails to take into cognizance or blatantly contravenes the people’s tradition that the dead, the ancestors, are not to be put far away from home because the people will constantly interact with them; the dead are called upon now and then to help the living.

Characteristically, Ojaide brings in the issue of oil exploration in this poem which appears to be about the negative effects of religion on his community. He cleverly fuses the two and the sense we have is that religion comes first and prepares the ground, through its civilizing mission, for the incursion of explorers of crude oil. Or, as the stanzas quoted below show, religion is used to capture the minds of the people so that they are easily inducted into the discourse used to destroy the cultural values and physical environment of their own community:

In the south campfires of oil barons litter the landscapes;

stoked all year round by helmet-wearing graduates

who consider themselves lucky, paid foreign currency

instead of the naira; an astute ploy to buy their loyalty.

The streams and creeks clogged to keep ocean tankers full,

we no more boast of fresh water or the abundance of fish. (13)

The “helmet-wearing graduates” are people of the community who have gone to school, courtesy of the civilizing mission; who have acquired technological skills and are using the same skills, in the thinking of the poet, to bring environmental disaster upon the biodiversity of the land. They are lured into doing this with “foreign currency” — most oil workers in Nigeria are paid in dollars. With utmost enthusiasm and energy, therefore, they embark on activities that they themselves know will eventually harm the environment. If fresh water is polluted, how can the humans and animals and plants in the environment survive? This is why the poet’s lamentation, such as we see throughout the poems discussed in this study, is all about the survival of his community and its biodiversity, all about the preservation of his home. Ojaide ends this poem by fusing the negative effects of Christianity and oil exploration in this way: the converts continue to say that if the people of the community do not listen to their preaching and do not obey their God’s commandments, they will end up in hell fire. But hell fire of the type the Christians talk about, the poet explains, is already here in his community, brought by “profiteers” (34) and “helmet-wearing graduates”. There is therefore no need to talk of any hell fire to come when it already exists in the Niger Delta community. The logic that if the people do not listen to them they will go to hell is absurd, for the community is already consumed by hell fire because the people have listened to them, have accepted their religion and civilization. The Christians and their civilization are in fact the bringers of the fires of hell.

The strategy of placing the pristine past and the painful present, seen in the poems studied here, offers Ojaide a locus for poetic agency whereby his poetry could be better understood as an anti-establishment discourse. The idea of nature as home, premised on his privileging of traditionalism (consistent in his poetry since Children of Iroko), is to reinforce this notion of poetry as discourse, since it is the passion the poet feels for his home, now lost, that enables his confrontational (that is, political) historicization of the Niger Delta condition. The anger in his poetry is directed towards global capitalism and the Western civilization that produced it —specifically, how global capitalism has contributed to destroying his home.

Conclusion

Ojaide is a self-confessed homeboy griot, widely regarded as the poet–oracle of the Niger Deltascape (see Okuyade, 2011). In interviews and his nonfiction, he clearly expresses the organic link between his poetry and his homeland, aesthetically and politically. This link has shaped his artistic endeavour. While he is resident in the USA and globetrots around the world, he trains a very keen eye on the Niger Delta region of Nigeria; his homeland being one of the communities that make up the region. This keen watch has become more acute with the mounting pressures on the Nigerian national government to reconstruct the region after decades of environmental degradation. The Niger Delta region, from all accounts, has suffered from what Rob Nixon (2011) calls slow violence — the accumulated neglects, by a mindless government or institution, of the environment from which they mine wealth. Ojaide’s poetry exhibits a palpable aggression in his lamentation about his destroyed community, his lost home. His choice of images clearly indicates that he is in combat against the institutions of power that have inflicted violence on the Niger Delta community. Indeed, as some of the poems in The Tale of the Harmattan show, the blame is not upon foreigners alone but also upon natives, now “helmet-wearing graduates”, working for the oil corporations that bring untold injury on the biodiversity of the Niger Delta region. While it is possible that some readers might see something of parochialism — that Ojaide’s viewpoint, expressed in his poetry, is persistently narrow and straitjacketed into what I call the rhetoric that the past was pristine — his poetry nevertheless could usefully be understood as a product of an aesthetics of rage from a poet, indeed a person, who watches with utmost sadness how his community, the very home in which he was raised, has turned from a quiet, pastoral, natural home into what he calls the flares of hell. In this line, we can then interpret Ojaide’s strident jeremiads as the angst of a man who is not really saying that civilization and development would not have come to his land; what he is saying instead is that this civilization and development initially came with the promise of good life but ends up bringing a nightmare. It is not just about failure of promise; it is about deliberate, accumulated neglects on the part of governments and oil-exploring corporations.