Abstract
Tanure Ojaide’s poetry has been discussed primarily with focus on his social activism, with occasional attention paid to his deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo poetry. However, a career-long preoccupation which hitherto has hardly received any critical attention is the poet’s presiding use of his poetry as metacommentary on the craft and purpose of his art. While privileging his 2010 collection The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy, this article examines selections from the body of Ojaide’s self-reflexive poetry in which he poetizes the role of the poet as an instance of the poet’s articulation of his poetics. It appraises the focal poems’ status as metacriticism by underscoring their abiding correspondence with Ojaide’s vision of poetry as expressed in interviews and scholarly writings, and by examining the aesthetic implications of his firm anchorage of his work in the tradition of indigenous African poetry.
The self-image: Poets on their art
How do poets imagine their art? There is a long tradition of poets proffering revelatory insights into their art, not in critical treatises, but as privileged images in their poetry itself. Shakespeare’s conflation of the hallucinations of the lunatic and the delusions of love with poetic inspiration in A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains, perhaps, one of the most memorable examples. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poet in “Kubla Khan”, witch-like with her overflowing hair and flashing eyes, nurtured on honeydew and the milk of paradise, possessed by her own genius, is a kindred spirit of Shakespeare’s poet. Purveyors of extraordinary news, distinguished even by their physical otherness, they provide, as William Blake tells us, the only means of communication between time and eternity which neither the flood of time nor place has eroded.
In Nigerian poetry, Niyi Osundare’s “Poetry Is” in his 1983 collection Songs of the Marketplace, distinctive in its self-conscious inauguration of a postcolonial poetic revolution, is arguably the most cited self-reflexive poem, foregrounding the craft of poetry and the purpose of the poet’s calling. The compelling image of the poet as human and earth-bound rather than as superhuman, privileging an accessible idiom of expression and achingly aware of the implications of having a human audience, is an engaging fusion of the aesthetics and ethics of the practice of postcolonial poetry, its demonstrable Wordsworthian background notwithstanding.
Much of the critical attention paid to the work of the distinguished Nigerian poet, Tanure Ojaide, has focused on his exploration of the despoliation of the natural environment by multinational oil companies in the Niger Delta, and the consequent impoverishment of the indigenous populations (Nwagabra, 2010; Ojaruega, 2014; Egya, 2018). Some attention has equally been paid to Ojaide’s deployment of the techniques of indigenous Urhobo literature (Aiyejina, 1988; Ojaruega, 2015). However, the Ojaide oeuvre contains a considerable corpus of self-reflexive poems that highlight the poet’s sustained meditation on the poet, his/her craft as well as sources of inspiration, responsibilities, and powers. Ranging from poems of self-introspection to the occasional praise of or elegy on a comrade poet, this hitherto unexamined unified body of poetry is critical for an appreciation of Ojaide’s poetics, as it embodies his thoughts on both the poet’s craft and mission. In this article, I examine a selection of poems from Ojaide’s oeuvre held together by their articulation of the role and aesthetics of the poet as poetized by Ojaide; I draw extensively on his 2010 collection The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy, which I consider a rich repository of the focal poems, and also make selections from Ojaide’s most recent collections Songs of Myself: Quartet (2015) and The Questioner: New Poems (2018). My aim is to underscore the subject as a career-long preoccupation of the poet. Thus, this paper proposes to begin an investigation of Ojaide’s poetics as revealed in his body of self-reflexive poetry.
The scholar-poet and the African muse
In his interview with Ezichi Onyerionwu, Ojaide emphasises the close relationship between his work as a writer and as a scholar, and contends that his writing of poetry is undergirded by carefully considered aesthetic and philosophical principles deriving from indigenous African practice: “I see myself as a scholar-poet in the sense that I try to philosophize my own aesthetics, it’s not that I’m just writing poetry. I have an aesthetics which mediates between the oral and the written traditions. So what I study as a scholar (like the oral literatures of my Urhobo nationality) inform the kind of poetry I write” (2012: 328). Thus, this focus on Ojaide’s self-reflexive poetry, and invariably on his anchoring of his poetry in Urhobo poetic tradition, extends the fixation of early criticism of written African literature on the attributes of that emergent literature as well as its authentic sources of inspiration and pattern of development.
In his seminal article “The Dead End of African Literature?”, Obiajunwa Wali regarded that new literature as “a minor appendage” of European literature, given its deep immersion and that of its criticism in the traditions of Western literature. He thought that the greatest limitation of neo African literature was its expression in European languages (Wali, 2007/1963: 282). Chinweizu, however, did not think that the expression of neo African literature in European languages was its most decisive constraint; he drew attention instead to its Eurocentricity in the form, sensibilities, and attitudes adopted by its writers whom he dismissed as prodigals (2007/1973: 219). On the other hand, in “Path of Thunder”, the last poetry sequence of Christopher Okigbo (whose earlier poetry had been vilified as the embodiment of Euromodernism), the great African advocate of nativist aesthetics discerned “a powerful use of traditional form in a non-traditional poem in English; an enrichment as well as an extension of African poetry in English” by the poet’s drawing on elements from the African tradition (2007: 220). It is crucial that Chinweizu acknowledged that the power of Okigbo’s last poetry derived partly also from the fact that Okigbo brought to his “work valuable lessons he had learned from other traditions, Western Modernism not excluded” (2007: 221). Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike write at greater length to observe that the basic failure of much of pioneer written African poetry is its imitative rehash of Euromodernist poetry with all its stultifying characteristics (1980: 163).
In the same vein, Emmanuel Obiechina argued that the possession of literature was a distinctive characteristic of all human communities. Its functions are not only myriad but are integral to a people’s conception of life and its possibilities: “It helps the community to clarify its basic ideas of morality, its sense of what constitutes the beautiful, the sublime, and the comical in human affairs” (1990/1978: 182). Consequently, Obiechina’s interrogation of the ascription of paradigmatic status to European literature (Greek drama, for instance) does not only affirm the sovereignty of the indigenous African tradition. It also valorizes it as a vital source for written African literature, given its distinctive power to signal the people’s understanding of the “limits of the achievements of the human imagination or of revealing to them, forcefully and dramatically, the nature of life itself, its numerous and intractable dilemmas, its paradoxes, and the ambivalences that surround man from his birth to his death” (1990: 182).
Characterising pre-Civil War Nigerian poetry as devoid of public spiritedness, unduly Eurocentric, and esoteric, Funso Aiyejina contends that the brute realities of the events leading to the war and the horrors of the war itself demanded a sober overhauling of such self-indulgent poetic attitudes. Aiyejina locates the Okigbo of “Path of Thunder” at the heart of the new movement for his articulation of the sordid realities of the nation (1988: 113). Ben Obumselu, who has painstakingly demonstrated the influence of Virgil, Pound, Eliot, and Mallarmé on Okigbo’s poetry, recalls that the poet’s discovery of traditional Yoruba poetry in the early 1960s had a fundamental impact on his conception of poetry and its uses:
He knew next to nothing about the traditional poetry of the Igbo, the Wollof, or mythical Nigrita. But as the texts of odu Ifa, ijala, and iwi began to appear in the 1960s, he put himself to school, as we all did, under Yoruba indigenous poetry, which seemed so splendid in its use of colloquial resources, its spiritual depth and imaginative vitality, and the charm of its tonal melody. This pupillage strengthened Okigbo’s power to deal with social reality. The akewi worshipped Ogun who inspired him but he kept his eyes focused on the ground. (2006: 70)
The crucial debate was on the pioneer poets’ aesthetics and the utilitarian purpose of their poetry, and the tradition in which a writer’s work was anchored was considered decisive in determining these questions. In “Path of Thunder”, the lessons of Okigbo’s pupillage to the indigenous heritage of African poetry came to full blossom, and was, moreover, strengthened by the fruits of his enduring devotion to Western literature.
Aiyejina considers Osundare the ultimate fulfilment of the great clamour for the “public poet” who is moreover rooted in the indigenous African poetic tradition and locates Ojaide in the same school: “Ojaide, like most of the new Nigerian poets, emphathises (sic) with the downtrodden and employs a poetic style which is, as in the case of Osundare, derived from an indigenous poetics” (1988: 124–125). In this regard, Osundare’s “Yoruba Thought, English Words”, is invaluable in setting out in engrossing details his conception of poetry as song based on the indigenous Yoruba model as well as the challenges he faces and the choices he is often constrained to make as a Yoruba poet writing in English: “Poetry for me is song, performance; it is utter-ance. In the beginning was not the Word, in the Word was the beginning. But the Word was a tablet of letters and symbols, mute and immobile until endowed with the animating power of the human voice” (2002: 127). Repeatedly affirming the inseparability of sounding and meaning both in indigenous Yoruba poetry and his own, Osundare stresses his conception of the supremacy of music in poetry: “I am more of an ear than an eye poet. On certain desperate occasions when a quarrel erupts between the sounding and the meaning of a word, I often tilt the scale in favour of the former” (2002: 127).
Ojaide himself has repeatedly acknowledged the prevailing influence of the oral literature of his ethnic Urhobo culture on his work, often singling out specifically the profound influence of the performance of the Udje dance song. He underscores not only his having grown up in the culture where the dance-poetry is performed but also his close scholarly study of the tradition, first in the 1970s assisting the renowned Urhobo literary scholar G. G. Dara in field work, and later in the 1990s with funding provided by the US National Endowment for the Humanities. Ojaide is ecstatic in his evaluation of the impact of that experience on him: “My period of collecting and translating those songs at home in 1999 has been one of my most exhilarating in my life. It was a humbling experience to listen to poetic songs whose composers were not much known outside their immediate locations. The Udje dance song-poets are my masters” (2002: 226). Enajite Ojareuga traces to this tradition the preponderance of such poetic techniques as descriptive epithets, caricature, repetition, refrain, and performance features in Ojaide’s poetry which she contends serve to achieve emphasis and musicality (2015: 154). It is signal that Ojaide’s attitude to the Urhobo tradition clearly transcends a mere striving towards its conservation. It is instead the preservation of the indigenous form by extending its frontiers through deploying it in new contexts and adapting it to new challenges:
The Urhobo poetic conventions would give vitality to modern poetry and, being familiar with the conventions, I adopt some of them where applicable. As Federico Garcia Lorca said of Spanish cante jondo, the traditional Udje song is an artistic treasure that is on the road to oblivion. Modernizing it, by using the form to write in English, will be my way of trying to arrest the old practitioners of the poetic genre from “taking to the grave priceless treasures of past generations”. (2002: 226–267)
By merging the poetic forms of different cultures, the poet is not merely a conservationist but even more importantly an innovator and creator of new artistic forms.
Self-reflexive poetry as metacriticism
Ojaide’s The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems was published in 1990. That this sixth published volume of his poetry contains several manifesto poems — such as “The Music of Pain” and “My Next Step”— which are explicit in their self-conscious statement of his poetics demonstrates how crucial it still was for the poet at that stage of his career to articulate his mission, and for the tradition from which that mission derives to be made self-evident. In “The Music of Pain”, the first poem in the collection The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems, the coalescence of Ojaide’s well known poetic principles with those of the poet-speaker establishes the poem’s status as metacommentary. Drawing on “the chorus of resistant cries | to excoriate the land’s scurvy conscience”, the poet persona underscores his poetry as counterhegemonic and aimed “against over lords | who clamped reins upon the jawbones | of upright words” (1990: 2). The presiding war imagery of the poem paints a portrait of the committed poet as a warrior on whose self-sacrificial adventures in war or hunting the preservation of the clan lies. Poetry is characterised as words dressed “with steel shafts” in preparation “for a long hunting season” (2). The poet persona draws on the related trope of soldiery to foreground the kinship between the vocation of the poet and the lot of the clan: “My songs became the land’s infantry | drawing into its veins | the strength of millions; | it took the cause of the country | into its expanding heart” (2). In this schema, Ojaide’s poet is a combatant, in league with frightful forces of the African bestiary against the oppressors of the people:
They have the bite of desperate ones! They are fine-filed matchets in the hands of the threatened! They are a swarm of mystery bees haunting robbers of the proud heritage! My song has captured the roar of lions and the jungle mortars of elephants. (2)
For this poet, the meaning of poetry is a threnody, “the music of communal pain” (3), and its basic purpose is restorative.
By its theme as by its dedication to the Malawian writer-activist Jack Mapanje, “My Next Step” in the same collection as “The Music of Pain” does not only complement the latter poem as a manifesto poem; it complicates the poet’s burden. The image of the poet as a soldier is sustained in this poem as the persona “enlist[s] in the army of instant recovery” and moreover desires to “give birth to new warriors | who will love the abused land with their bodies” (1990: 20). This poem charts the path to the poet’s realization that self-giving is the hallmark of activism:
Daemons of resistance are pacing about my head; they goad me beyond mere slogans. I pledge not only support, I give my life if that’s what it takes to revive the land. (21)
Neither poem, of course, is a typical traditional praise poem. Each, however, pays special tribute to the poet whose self-sacrificial art and whose own predilection for self-giving are transformative forces in society. Karen Armstrong has shown that the impact of the symbolic pattern of death and rebirth at the heart of ancient initiation rites is the transformation of adolescent boys into men willing to assume self-transcending responsibilities for their communities: “At the end of his ordeal, the boy has learned that death is a new beginning. He returns to his people with a man’s body and soul. By facing up to the prospect of imminent death, and learning that it too is only a rite of passage to a new form of existence, he is ready to risk his life for his people by becoming a hunter or warrior” (2005: 34). Ojaide’s image of the poet as a self-sacrificial hunter or soldier is ultimately a valorization of the ancient praise of the warrior as guardian and provider of the clan. The poet is only the modern incarnation of the self-transcending cultural hero. In the interview he granted to Okunoye, Ojaide ranks the Udje dance-poetry and Okigbo as the most enduring influences on his poetry (2002: 225–226). Okigbo’s embodiment of the ideal of self-immolation in the public interest, as “Path of Thunder” explicitly documents, may well have accounted for that adulation. Ojaide equally shows, however, that Okigbo’s poetry was gripping to his imagination too.
The claim of the poet persona in “The Music of Pain” that his “song has captured the roar of lions | and the jungle mortars of elephants” requires some attention, as it draws some comparison with Okigbo’s own practice, and equally sets in relief the distinctions between an oral idiom and print and what is achievable in both media. The adroit use of sound effects to evoke or replicate particular sounds either for serious effects or as parody depends much on the resources of the poet’s language, and invariably draws on such sound effects as ideophones, onomatopoeias, assonances, alliterations, or incremental repetitions. This technique is the forte of many oral (African) performers, and is part of what makes the translation of the orature of many tonal African languages into English virtually impossible. Quite apart from retaining the words of their African languages in works of English expression to achieve this effect, many African poets have also attempted to deploy English sounds in a manner reminiscent of oral African bards. Okigbo’s fascinating mimicry of the stampede of elephants highlights the true representational implication of the poet persona’s claim in “The Music of Pain”:
Thunder of tanks of giant steps of detonators Fail safe from the clearing, we implore you. (1971: 45)
Tracing Okigbo’s technique here to the poet’s discovery in 1965 of the performance idiom of Akan drum elegies, Obumselu protests that the lines hardly make sense; but he notes: “Okigbo is trying to imitate the deafening tumult of an elephant stampede. They rumble like military tanks with iron steps and create detonations. The sense is reinforced by the massing of hard dental sounds and the crowding of stresses in the middle of the line” (2006: 73). In the same vein, in Waiting Laughters Ojaide’s contemporary Osundare exploits sounds as an auditory mimesis of echoing voices rumbling across rolling hills (Diala, 2016: 397):
We are a village of hills, A village of rolling hills, Those who sharpen dark knives For our fledgling voice Will go back home, drowned in the deluge Of its echoes Of its echoes Of its echoes In the deluge of its stubborn e…ch…o…es (Osundare, 1990: 67)
Thus, the roar of Ojaide’s lions and the jungle mortars of his elephants are mere declarations not enacted in the poem “The Music of Pain”, as in the practice of oral African performers (and many of their heirs) whose heritage he exalts, and certainly exemplifies in some of his poetry.
In “Okigbo Listens to New Poets”, in The Fate of Vultures and Other Poems, Ojaide makes explicit what he admires in Okigbo’s poetry as he engages with the attributes of good poetry and indicts the presumptuousness of younger (Nigerian) writers seeking to upstage their predecessors. The poem highlights what Ojaide regards as the endearing quality of Okigbo’s poetry: his music.
1
It adopts the form of the Udje dance-poem in its juxtaposition of antithetical attributes ascribed to Okigbo on the one hand and the new poets on the other.
2
So, where the poet speaker’s mode of appraisal of Okigbo’s poetry is panegyric, his attitude to the new poets is satirical. The presumptuousness of the younger poets is manifest in their self-delusion as song-birds when they are merely inarticulate butterflies; as the bride when they are only bridesmaids. They are deflated further as commonplace “chiefs” rather the “kings” they masquerade as, and as self-anointed “newly-risen stars” whose modesty is thrown into relief by the grandeur of the rising sun. The poet speaker actually concedes utility to the work of the new generation of poets, by likening it to the “cock’s crow” capable of waking people up from sleep, but sees it as bereft of aesthetic value. Self-consciously echoing phrases from Okigbo’s “Heavensgate”, Ojaide exalts Okigbo’s poetry for its music potentially capable of transforming poetry into a powerful elemental force that enables the human soul to contemplate the deepest mysteries of life (Diala, 2020: 128). On the other hand, the imitative work of the new generation is indicted for being incapable of transporting the human pilgrim “to the hills | where streams invite for cleansing” (Ojaide, 1990: 52). The ultimate praise for the great poet at the close of the poem is not the controversial hierarchical arrangement of gender in which the male is preeminent; it is his heightened agency as a cultural hero of the clan with a discernible godly disposition:
And his ears strain for passionate notes and, a man where others are women, he walks out, shouting with a divine sneer; where are the slit-drums I left you, where are the lithe fingers of the wind? (52)
The Okigbo heritage which Ojaide exalts as a resolution to the deficiencies in contemporary practice, as the reference to the slit-drum indicates, is the Okigbo of “Path of Thunder” for whom the discovery of his African heritage was a divine boon.
More than a third of the poems in The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy, published in 2010, that is almost four decades after Ojaide’s first collection Children of Iroko and Other Poems (1973), have the poet and the art of poetry as their subject. Ojaide is concerned to illuminate the mystical source of the poet’s inspiration and so to set in relief the processes of accretion of power to the poet’s word. Traditional in his conception of poetic inspiration, Ojaide in the collection evokes the enchanted world in which the poet is a receptacle and conduit of a divine message. Driven by the power of the god, Ojaide’s poet transcends mortal limits, and envisions a reality beyond the frontiers of his/her human powers. In the important title poem “The Beauty I Have Seen”, the poet speaker reaffirms the ancient challenge that confronts the poet: the futile search for the enchanted words to incarnate the singular vision of beauty granted to the poet: “The beauty I have seen in abundance abroad, | no picture however embellished can capture; | the stars that have shone their hearts for me, | the same brilliance they can never replicate for the world” (2010: 67). The poet speaker further asks: “How can the minstrel display the effervescence | of the present to outlive the very moment that blooms?” (68). He acknowledges that “memory nudges on with its constellations” but is in anguish to note “that beauty’s hour can’t relive its prime” (68). Recognising poetry as “the gift of words” (67; emphasis added), and poetic success as an act of good fortune, Ojaide introduces another deity to the African pantheon of deity-muses by associating poetry with Aridon, the Urhobo Muse and god of memory. In a phrase that recurs in the collection — the nod of the Muse to the minstrel — Ojaide treats poetry as divine election, and suggests that the core of the grandeur of poetry is ultimately traceable to mysterious supernatural origins.
Ojaide’s selections and accumulation of cultural contexts to reaffirm as well as dramatize the traditional concepts of the deity-muse and the poet, the relationship between them, and the implications of the poet’s vocation in The Beauty I Have Seen: A Trilogy are instructive. His exploitation of the folk belief in the mermaid as the queen of the river, and moreover a paramour of the fisherman-poet, is one such example. Ojareuga, who has examined Ojaide’s use of the mythology of his Urhobo ethnic group, notes that Ojaide uses “Mami Wata” or mermaid interchangeably with the Yoruba goddess Olokun who bestows good fortune, wealth, and beauty on devotees (2015: 155). In the poem “The Minstrel Is a Fisherman”, the deadly snake that guards the mermaid and which “must first be won over before embracing timeless beauty” (2010: 23) is a metaphor for the symbolic death the fisherman-poet must endure in the public interest. In the poem, the return of the fisherman-poet after his sojourning with his consort the mermaid to the needy human world is a virtual resurrection; and, gifted with new powers, he is an incarnate spirit capable of transforming the human lot. The poet is a burnt sacrifice to the divinity capable of transforming the human situation.
The divinity of the Muse, like the modesty of the poet, is also evident in Ojaide’s evocation of the immensity of creation, and his discernment of the creator’s breath as poetry whose rhythmic force undergirds the world in a legion of variegated forms. Thus, there are songs that “play on lips of the retinue of water spirits | escorting the water-maid to the depths of the Atlantic”; the work songs of army ants; the rhythm of the wings of eagles in flight across the sky; the anxious heartbeat of a lonely traveller exorcising demons of terror; the apocalyptic cadences of vengeful or remonstrative fires, and much more. This is the cosmic background in which the poet’s complete dependence on the benevolence on the Muse is recurrently emphasised. Described as a “wizard [who] sees without strain in the dark” (2010: 9), and whose gift of song is an “elixir” capable of curing “migraines of misery”, the poet is routinely “[t]ransported into primeval rapture by the zeal for song” and “knocks out others for a singular vision of beauty” (9); but he suffers a delusion of divine grandeur only at his own peril: “let the masquerade never claim the divinity | of the god he masks in costume and dance” (12). Improvident, sworn both to eternal poverty and eternal worshipful veneration of the Muse, purveyor of an art whose economic irrelevance is highlighted by its inadequacy as barter for even such basic necessities as “palm oil, fresh fish, or table salt” (32), the poet illustrates the necessary symbolic asceticism and homelessness that characterise his/her visionary vocation. However, he/she also exemplifies the spiritual powers of mendicancy. His/her daring witnessing under the injunction of the Muse at the market place, presented by the poet speaker as an ambivalent arena for the convocation of the living and the dead and for staging unregenerate human promptings, is sanctioned as a proclamation of a higher order of morality:
I come to poeticize the arithmetic of prices, denials of poverty and delusions of wealth. I ring the bell at tilted scales and other measures; I sing aloud against the hat trick of usurers. (Ojaide, 2010: 33)
Poetry proffers sober timeless moral truths that are damaging to self-deceptions and the acquisitive instinct. It has crucial social functions, and the poet dares to perform them even in inauspicious circumstances. The iron gong of the traditional town-crier, which Okigbo popularizes as a defining accoutrement of the modern African poet, and which recurs in Ojaide’s work, is ultimately evoked as a symbol of the power and clarity which the poet’s voice attains when it is unencumbered by selfish desires and alliances.
Oriki of a poet
“The Minstrel Wails”, Ojaide’s breathtaking elegy for Ezenwa-Ohaeto, the Nigerian poet and scholar who died while on a research fellowship at the University of Cambridge in 2005, understandably offers a stirring vision of a poet’s fate, and his/her relationship with the Muse. The poem is unarguably Ojaide’s most traditional oriki or praise for a poet. It is traditional in its unfaltering fulsome praise of its subject’s generosity, altruism, and innovation and in its typical direct address of the oriki subject:
You who brought firewood to the communal hearth stoked it and kept warm everybody in the cold, you who placed your harvest of yams on the table so that no one would be tortured by furious famine you made a road to the sun and to the moon so that there will always be pathways to our dreams (37)
The poet’s selfless embodiment of all the needs of his community is highlighted throughout the poem as in the oral form, and the trajectory of those needs ranges from the social to the visionary. Substituting “taunting famine” with “furious famine” is one of the most significant few changes that Ojaide makes in the text of the original version of the poem published in the special 2006 issue of the journal Matatu dedicated to Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s memory. The preference of the harsher and sombre music made by the alliterative labiodental fricative sound “f” to the relative playfulness of “taunting” creates a graver catastrophe that heightens the benevolent impact of the oriki hero’s intervention.
The poem is even typical of the oriki in a more intriguing way: its retention of the war imagery characteristic of the traditional African praise. Ruth Finnegan has remarked that the most distinguished traditional African praises invariably dwell on war, and that often even peaceful exploits are typically expressed in military terms (1970: 126). Indeed, writing earlier than Finnegan on the ebyevugo among the Ankole of East Africa, Obumselu identified them as epic recitations composed by Ankole warriors to commemorate their heroism in battle. He notes however that long after the cessation of tribal wars in East Africa, the Ankole still retained the background and vocabulary of military operations to celebrate any social event in which courage was displayed: “Thus, in 1949, when the Abassasam clan moved their cattle fairly peaceably from Nyabushozi to Buganda, Rumanywe composed an ebyevugo in which the movement of troops, the clashing of spears, and the heaping up of corpses are described” (1966: 47). That is the background that illuminates Ojaide’s practice in “The Minstrel Wails”. In the poem, characteristically, Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s death through illness is evoked in terms of a warrior’s fall reminiscent of a spectacular combat between death and the elephant:
At last death threw you down flat after you wrestled with all your warrior heart. Until the final fall even with deep bruises brave one, your face still lit with smiles. Death that tackled the elephant to fall in the forest, who can escape its stifling grasp in a clearing? (2010: 36)
The exploitation of the traditional heroic image serves to emphasize the valuation of the poet.
Writing on the death of a great poet, Ojaide cannot resist the impulse for a philosophical meditation on life. Like Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais”, and kindred poems on the same theme whose echoes are discernible in the poem, “The Minstrel Wails” invariably moves from death to rebirth, from mourning to elation as the dead poet is offered “another lease of life”. If, normally, Ojaide’s conception of a poet’s fate is beneficent in spite of his/her material struggles, in “The Minstrel Wails” it is the unpredictability of destiny that is the prevailing thought: “Why [death] picked on you so early, I know not. | We are all prone to the random punch of woes” (36). Unlike in a poem such as “The Minstrel Is a Refugee” in the same collection, which offers an assurance of divine protection for the poet amidst the vicissitudes of life, the iterative suggestion in “The Minstrel Wails” is that the gift of poetry is ultimately portentous and its cost possibly life itself:
We cannot tell the mind of fate — who receives the blessings of minstrelsy suffers its calamitous blow. The muse that lavishes her favourite with gifts, the same muse gives him up in a storm to spirits. (36)
Ojaide’s conception of the poet though is expectedly replete with paradoxes. The poet is not only a hunter of the people’s sworn enemies; he/she is at the same time the hunted. Hunter and hunted, earth-bound yet immortal spirit, dead but reborn into eternal life, Ojaide’s emblematic poet in his/her fortunes highlights the archetypal transformation that is traditional in the conception of a poet’s lot. Life remains an experience of value in spite of death, because by the immortality of his/her work the poet extends the frontiers of human life:
Death tackles the young elephant to a fall, but the tusks raise songs that outlive the call — we lose what we love and live on with the virtues; so your voice reverberates with ardour from beyond. (37)
Ojaide’s recurring use of euphemisms and deliberate understatements to suggest the transition rather than the death of the poet reaches its peak at the close of the poem, and plays a crucial role in creating its dominant triumphant mood. “Tackles”, which occurs early in the poem in its past form “tackled”, like “fall” and “call”, transmutes the gravity of the experience of death by relocating it to the arena of a tough bruising game. Similarly, the covering of the dead poet, who is transformed to a blazing star, by dust-clouds, is certainly no cause for tears, especially in the context of the repeated affirmation of his immortality which is foregrounded by the recurring use of the word “life” in its variant forms as verb, as gerund, and as noun:
The wail for the startling star covered by dust-clouds must stop; the beauty of appearance lives on with us from another dawn in the making — you live everywhere, and the living must stop wailing for the new life that gives the departed another lease of life to bloom beyond the fatalities of poachers. (37)
The rebirth of the deceased into immortality through death is imagined as a new lease of life that “bloom[s] beyond the fatalities of poachers”, in an extension of the dominant hunting metaphor of the poem.
A pantheon of deity-muses
In Songs of Myself: Quartet, published in 2015, Ojaide’s poem “To the New Wordsmiths” returns to the subject of a new generation of poets seeking to upstage their more illustrious predecessors which he treated 25 years earlier in “Okigbo Listens to New Poets”. In the more recent poem, he updates and complicates the matter by addressing new questions on the impact of technology on the composition, transmission, and performance of poetry, as well as its implication for the reputation of the poet. Nonetheless, the central issue highlighted once again is the quality of the poet’s craft. The poet speaker is dismissive of the so called word-poets, whose exultation in a profusion of words denies their work depth, finesse, and musicality. The self-acclaimed poets are denounced as immature “baby imbogis”, lacking both in talent and in the exertions and rigours of the true poet. The poet speaker is mournful that the ritual props of the poet’s inspiration and legitimation have shifted from the gods to technology, and that the enabling tradition of painstaking apprenticeship to canonical figures which guarantees aesthetic continuities has given way to self-canonization and the adulation of artless Twitter followers and Facebook friends (See Diala, 2021). The poet speaker is disconsolate to
see children pass Ogun, Idoto, and Tamara without pause in a journey without destination; they laugh at me for prostrating before elders whose paths brought me so far before clearing mine. They meet themselves in Facebook and become friends worship themselves only to break up with insults on stage. The new griots in ponds behave as if in an ocean, but despite global glare are fish in a bowl of water that cannot wander far — (2015: 78)
Biodun Jeyifo has observed the imperative of pioneer Nigerian writers like Achebe, Soyinka, Okigbo, and Clark “to locate the deepest sources of their writings in institutions, symbols, and idioms of creativity of their ethno-cultural backgrounds” (2011: 53). He remarks specifically on Soyinka’s adoption of Ogun the Yoruba god of metallurgy, warfare, and creativity, and Okigbo’s invocations of the river goddess Idoto as their Muses respectively; and notes how as deities and avatars, Muses are “traditional institutionalizations of artistic and intellectual inspiration” (2011: 53). Ojaide did not only adopt Aridon the Urhobo deity as his own Muse, he also ushers in Uhaghwa, the Urhobo god of performance, and Tamara, God in Ijaw, into the pantheon of African writers’ deity-muses. Accounting for the illusory popularity of the so-called new poets in the inability of contemporary audiences to distinguish between “listening” and merely “hearing”, the poet speaker underlines his hostility to the technological innovation which diminishes the grandeur of poetry that comes from its association with otherworldly beings and sources.
Ojaide’s most recent collection, The Questioner: New Poems (2018), demonstrates further his status as a self-conscious practitioner given to both experimentation and a rigorous theorization of his art. The preface of the collection highlights his continuing contemplation on the art of poetry. Ojaide articulates the urgent need to reinvent contemporary African poetry, which otherwise seems to have exhausted itself, in order to make it “more robust, reflective of the contemporary African global experience, reality and aesthetic desires” (2018: 8). Reappraising issues of theme, structure, and technique capable of refreshing and reinvigorating contemporary African poetry, Ojaide strives to have his new poetry take into “consideration the African experience in the age of globalization and high technology and the need to sharpen the intellectual appetite through novel aesthetic experimentations” (2018: 9). He contends further that the “poet of today has to be an enchanter to turn the world from its many distractions to a new type of artistic beauty” (9). As the poem “To the Spirit of Song” in the collection underscores, Ojaide is deeply convinced that the substance of the power through which the poet is transformed into an otherworldly creature, capable in turn of transforming a mundane world into a feeling and sensitive audience, is itself otherworldly. The minstrel of the poem Oforkpimi, in his late eighties, is Ojaide’s representative poet. Frail, comatose, and fixated on intoxication until reminded of his calling as a poet, Oforkpimi is “[i]nstantly lit up a reinvigorated body | with every fiber fired up by days of youth and songs” (118). Noting that “Spirit can never be frail in an old body”, Ojaide stages the rebirth of the decrepit minstrel as literal possession:
He shakes not from old age, sickness, or frailty but from being possessed by the spirit of song; vivified. He defies gravity with the sound of his spritely words now floating in the air which has snatched me along. (118)
Ojaide probes and is fascinated by the power by which the poet wrests himself free of the wreckage of his personal circumstances through his word, which, gathering the elemental force of nature like a wind, equally transforms his audience.
Conclusion
Ojaide has expressed deep frustration at the current monolithic critical fixation on just one theme of his poetry:
For several years now, I have engaged in other themes [beside the political], which relate to mythic transformations and the lessons to be learned from them. I have tried to be more philosophical. A poet’s mind is not fixated on one thing, nor is it static. A poet’s mind is fixed on many things at a time. Many things happen everyday anyway. I write about life, and politics happen (sic) to be part of it. [But] my poetry is more varied … I don’t want to be seen as just a political poet. I want to be seen in the totality of my complexity. (2002: 229–30)
The cult of social relevance, which the exigencies of the postcolonial condition have hardened into a virtual critical religion, understandably privileges the politics of most African writers. The poet’s social activism is at the core of Ojaide’s conception of a poet’s responsibility. His poet is typically likely to be located in the arena of social activism: “Many spot me protesting gas flares and oil blowouts, | arrested in Abuja for torching the robbers’ capitol” (2010: 15). His/her self-sacrificial assumption of social responsibility is his/her distinctive badge of virtue. Yet Ojaide’s poet, even more crucially, is a visionary artist whose music “close[s] the gaps of absence” and “fills solitude with notes of remembrance” (2010: 25). He/she is indeed like a mad man seeking in the tormented throes of his/her performances moments of relief to his/her existential anguish, “treating a deep wound nobody sees; | putting out fire burning his flesh and bones” (2010: 25). Through his poetry whose subject is poetry, Ojaide offers memorable insights into the enchanted process through which a poet’s word acquires transformative power.
