Abstract
Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana. A few years after the cataclysmic event, Osundare versified his experience in the poetry volume entitled City Without People. This article examines the narration of his painful experience and memories in the collection. I begin by exploring the thematization of pain in the volume, before proceeding to argue that the poet’s pain, largely psychic, is a product of losses of various kinds. The article goes further, demonstrating how the poet “worked through” the pain to attain wellness. Relying on insights from trauma theory, complemented by some assumptions about the concept of scriptotherapy, the analysis of poems drawn from across the collection demonstrates the paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain.
Introduction
Poetry in Africa has always been a functional art, whether in its traditional, modern, elitist, or popular form. One of its main functions is therapy, especially where psychological and emotional illnesses are concerned. In Yoruba culture, for instance, there are therapeutic chants in the form of incantatory poems which are used in healing different conditions of ill health, ranging from the physical to the mental and psychological. Drawing insights from other scholars, Oluwabunmi Bernard (2018: 2) identifies four types of incantatory poetry among the Yoruba. These are preventive, curative, luck-bringing, and feat-achieving. Other scholars have also pointed out some links between poetry and healing. For instance, in her highly acclaimed and popular work, Poetry and Story Therapy, Geri Chavis (2011: 11) recognizes the healing potential of poetry and notes that poetry has a special place in the history of healing. She goes on to make references to the shamans and medicine men and women of ancient civilizations as examples of people who rely on poetry to facilitate healing (Chavis, 2011: 11). She also cites the example of the psalms of the biblical David in the care of Saul (Chavis, 2011: 11). Similarly, Margaret Florey and Xenia Wolff (1998: 39) identify curative incantatory verse as part of the healing system among the Alune of Seram Island, eastern Indonesia. From the temporal and spatial diversity observable in these studies, it could be inferred that the potential of poetry to heal is ageless and universal. Other scholars, such as Gillie Bolton (1999), Gillie Bolton and Jeannie Wright (2004), Bodil Furnes and Elin Dysvik (2012), Suzette Henke (2000: xii), and James Pennebaker (2004) have similarly noted that poetry and other forms of writing, creative or otherwise, have therapeutic benefits. Indeed, this is Henke’s (2000: xii) argument when she notes that re-enacting psychological wounds in writing is often done with the aim of accessing healing. Furnes and Dysvik (2012), writing in the context of chronic pain, also espouse this view. For his part, Pennebaker singles out poetry as the genre most capable of having positive effects on people’s health because it often captures “the contradictions inherent in most emotions and experiences” (2004: 145). The positions of these scholars clearly suggest that though poetry writing or other kinds of writings may not yet enjoy scientific support, the effectiveness of writing as a means of attaining better health is hardly in doubt. Additional argument in support of this is provided in Bolton’s The Therapeutic Potential of Creative Writing (1999).
If, as noted earlier, poetry in Africa serves some practical purposes, it should therefore not be surprising that the poetry of Niyi Osundare does so also. Osundare is a Nigerian poet-scholar, who was a victim of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in 2005 in New Orleans, US. A few years after this cataclysmic event, he versified the Katrina experience in his autobiographical poetry volume entitled City Without People. Joseph Mayaki and Babatunde Omobowale (2020: 3) have pointed out that Niyi Osundare subscribes to the view that writing is therapeutic. They note that Osundare once admitted that he could have lost his sanity while living in the very frustrating and depressing Nigeria of the 1980s and 1990s, before his move to the United States, if it had not been for the escape he found in writing. His literary biographer, Sule Egya, has also noted that the poet’s fourth poetry volume, Moonsongs (Osundare, 1988), is “a product of intense therapeutic concentration” (Egya, 2017: 130). This acknowledgement suggests the possibility that the poems in City Without People were also composed by the poet as a means of getting relief from the depression and the pain of loss he experienced during and after the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans in 2005.
A notable writer, Graham Greene, alludes to the necessity of seeking sanity and wellness in writing when he wonders “how all those who do not write, compose or paint manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear inherent in a human situation” (1980: 9). Indeed, Osundare observes in the preface and blurb of City Without People that, in addition to serving other purposes, the collection is “a testimony that transcends trivial versification and verbal placebos” (2011: n.p.). From these attestations, one can see that the poems in the collection have other functional potentials besides a concern with purveying the truth of a painful experience. The poet’s words are carefully chosen and arranged in a manner that effectively serves the usual goal of testimonial literature. According to Yael Farber, testimonial literature possesses a “capacity for healing through speaking, hearing and being heard” (2008: 19). It is common knowledge that poetry deals with emotions: the affects of love, joy, sorrow, rage, disappointment, pain, and the like. While some of these emotions have been subjects of critical study in Osundare’s poetry, attention to the study of pain in his works is scarce. This is surprising given pain’s extensive representation in the collection under study, as well as in Moonsongs, one his collections that is highly celebrated for its technical accomplishment. In City Without People, besides the many instances that capture incidents of pain and their memories, a section of the volume comprising 11 poems is not only entitled “The Language of Pain” but is steeped in painful memories and experiences. In the first section of this article, I examine the narration of pain in the poetry volume, and argue that the poet’s pain is a product of losses of different kinds. In the second section, I demonstrate how the pain is “worked through” to attain wellness.
The phenomenology of pain
The International Association for the Study of Pain, in its recent review of the phenomenon, defines pain as an “unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage” (2020: n.p.). From this definition, one can see that emphasis is placed on both bodily and non-bodily hurts. Inherent in the definition is the idea that pain is a human condition that signifies discomfort or hurtful sensation in the body or the mind that experiences it. This understanding informs the analysis in this article, as physical, emotional, and psychological pains are examined.
Depending on the context of its experience or infliction, pain is both a natural and artificial phenomenon. However, it is particularly relevant and instructive to observe that pain is nearly absolutely synonymous with suffering, as Zoe Norridge (2013: 3) observes. Even when it may not appear so, little doubt exists over the fact that suffering usually results from the experience of pain, be it in the form of physical sensation or abstract emotion. Yet there are quite a number of divergent opinions about the phenomenon.
One of the key figures in the study of pain since the 1980s is Elaine Scarry. In her very influential work, The Body in Pain (1985), she puts forward two assumptions about pain. First is the notion that extreme pain destroys language. Another is that the dynamics of pain as it affects individuals are characterized by uncertainty. With respect to the former, Scarry argues that when the pain suffered is extreme, the sufferer becomes incapable of expressing it in any known language. The sufferer can only resort to “the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (1985: 4). This suggests that there is no possibility of being able to explore pain using language, even after the event of pain. This position is similar to the idea of trauma being unspeakable, as strongly argued by Cathy Caruth (1996) and Bessel van der Kolk et al. (1996: 337). However, this assumption has been critiqued by Richard McNally (2003), who insists that trauma victims can speak their experiences, but that they are often reluctant to do so.
Given the undeniable link between trauma and psychological and emotional pains, this article draws insights from trauma theory to undergird its analysis. Following McNally (2003) and Joshua Pederson (2014), the article supports the argument that trauma and, by implication, traumatic pain, is speakable. Interestingly, Caruth’s theory of trauma also makes an exception regarding trauma’s unspeakability, by noting that imaginative literature (that is, figurative language) can “speak” trauma, while normal language cannot. Scarry’s second assumption that uncertainty characterizes pain holds that the experience of pain remains doubtful to observers. This may be correct in the context of war and torture, which provided the data underpinning Scarry’s study. However, it would be hard, for instance, to persuade people to accept that a scream that emanates from pain due to an automobile accident injury or a health crisis occasioned by a sickle cell condition or cancer is doubtful to anyone.
Pain, as a condition of physical, emotional, and psychological discomfort, like illnesses, is a universal human experience. However, like all illnesses, there is some relativism about pain, as several scholars have argued. For instance, Byron Good (1992) and Nico Nortje and Rene Albertyn (2015) are of the view that there is diversity and plurality to the phenomenon of pain. As the former argue, “pain involves categories, idioms, and modes of experience that are greatly diverse” (Good, 1992: 1) when viewed through a cultural lens. The latter insist that because culture is ‘the framework that directs human behaviour in a given situation […,] culture also influences the meaning and expression of pain’ (Nortje and Albertyn, 2015: 1). In addition, Nortje and Albertyn (2015), while focusing on the expression and communication of pain, draw attention to the fact that among some African ethnic groups, emotional pain is usually hidden, citing Sesotho speakers as an example. The hiding of emotional pain is similarly encouraged among Yoruba men. 1 In fact, among the Yoruba, boys are usually socialized to hide emotional and, sometimes, physical pain. They are even discouraged from crying when they suffer painful physical harm. However, this does not mean that all those who suffer emotional or physical pain in African cultures, such as the ones cited here, always imbibe or cultivate this practice. Indeed, Osundare’s expression of pain is a subversion of the dominant cultural practice among his Yoruba ethnic group. This subversion could have been occasioned by the context of his writing, as the primary audience of the poems is Americans.
Perhaps the most inclusive yet succinct articulation of the phenomenon of pain is to be found in David Morris’s The Culture of Pain, where he observes that pain is “always reshaped by a particular time, place, culture and individual psyche” (1991: 6). This view is particularly relevant here, given the implication of the verb used in the phrasing of the idea — “reshaped” — which suggests that the recollection of a painful experience may not necessarily maintain fidelity to the original form due to the variables listed. In all possibility, Osundare’s pain in City Without People must have been reshaped by time and personal psychic circumstances.
In the critical literature on illness narratives, different aesthetic approaches are usually deployed depending on the type or structure of the narrative. For instance, Good (1992: 4) identifies and proposes three analytic concepts in engagements with illness narratives, namely “emplotting”, with emphasis on storyline arrangement; “subjunctivizing”, with a focus on the multiplicity of meaning; and “positioning of suffering”, which mainly concerns relating stories to their settings. This article draws on the concept of subjunctivizing as its critical framework.
Literary background of Niyi Osundare
Niyi Osundare is a Nigerian poet who belongs to the second generation of modern African poets (Adebiyi, 2015; Adebiyi-Adelabu and Aguele, 2019; Egya, 2011). These poets are famed for their rejection of the Euro-modernist style that dominates the poetry of their precursors. In Nigerian literary circles, Osundare is seen as a crest bearer of his generation of poets, and has published prolifically in this genre of literature, having 18 volumes of poetry to his credit. He is a winner of prestigious literary prizes such as the Overall Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1986), Noma Award for Publishing in Africa (1991), Fonlon/Nichols Prize for Excellence in Literary Creativity (1998), as well as the Tchicaya ’U Tam’si Prize for Africa Poetry, Africa’s highest poetry prize (2008). The collection, City Without People, also subtitled The Katrina Poems, draws afflatus from the tragic hurricane that ravaged New Orleans in 2005. Like Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge (2008), the collection is Osundare’s imaginative response to the disastrous experience and its consequences.
As a poet, Osundare is best known on the Nigerian literary landscape for two stylistic attributes, namely, the appropriation of folk tradition and the demystification of the language of poetry. While the former has been received with approval or disapproval by different critics, with little consequence for his fame, the latter has been particularly significant in scholars’ and critics’ estimation and positioning of Osundare within the growth of modern Nigerian poetry. Unapologetically rejecting the Euro-modernist aesthetics of his precursors who delight in what has been described by Chinweizu and Madubike (1980: 160) as “obscurantism”, Osundare privileges accessible language in his verse and promotes it in his public statements. This change in poetic idiom and approach has found positive reception and endured in the writings of the next generation of Nigerian poets to date. While it may be difficult to credit him with being the pioneer of this change, his meta-poetic lines in the famous poem, “Poetry Is”, where he speaks of poetry as not being esoteric, and instead as “man | meaning | to | man” Osundare (1983: 4), has earned him the status of the champion of what Funso Aiyejina (1987: 35) describes as the “alter/native tradition” in Nigerian poetry. Though primarily written for the United States’ audience, City Without People, was written in this tradition of accessible poetry. Probably because of this audience, the volume lacks the poet’s stylistic signature of ethnic folk resources.
“Writing out” pain in City Without People
“Writing out” is conceived in this article as a synonym of the term usually referred to as “acting out” in psychotherapy. The idea of “writing out” is what I also refer to as narration. This “writing out” or narration is intimately linked to the idea of sublimation foregrounded in the title of the article, but the two are distinguishable processes. In narration or “writing out”, experience is simply recalled or relived. In contrast, sublimation involves a performativity that simultaneously recalls and actively negotiates pain, and gestures towards wellness, wholeness, or reintegration into normal life.
Both ideas can also be likened to Sigmund Freud’s (1917) concepts of melancholia and mourning. According to Freud, melancholia is a condition in which the depressed and traumatized self is possessed by the past, fixated on an experience, and seized by compulsive repetition. On the other hand, mourning implies an attempt to get rid of compulsiveness in a manner that allows for some critical distance, change, and renewal. Although the ultimate objective of this article is to demonstrate how Osundare processes the pain inflicted on him by Hurricane Katrina and manages to attain some measure of wellness, I begin by engaging with the narration of pain in the collection, which constitutes the initial sections of the poetry volume. I find this necessary because I see the narration of pain here as symptomatic of what Dominick LaCapra has noted in respect of traumatic experiences in general, which is that “acting out may well be a necessary condition of working through, at least for victims” (1999: 717). In other words, before a meaningful “work through” is achieved, “acting out” is expected to have taken place.
In the opening poem of City Without People, “The Lake Came to My House”, the poet deploys photographic imagery in recollecting how the devastating flood that accompanied Hurricane Katrina steadily built up to wreak havoc on the city of New Orleans in general, and his personal house in particular. While the poem offers a poignant rendering of the painful memory associated with this experience, its highly lyrical tenor easily mutes the intensity of the pain, which later finds expression in many other poems in the collection, such as “Katrina Anthem”. In a manner suggestive of what Caruth (1996) describes as trauma’s unspeakability, the poet begins the piece with a stutter, as he struggles to pronounce the word Katrina, “Ka ka Katrina…” (2011: 14). 2 Indeed, given the overwhelming experience of the Katrina disaster, which is admitted by the poet in his preface to the collection and as is widely reported in the mediascape, it is little surprising that the poet had still not overcome some of the shocks he experienced at the time of the tragedy six years later, while refiguring it in this poem. The stuttering observed here points to some kind of emotional disequilibrium at a vital moment of what I call “poetic remembering”. By this, I mean the act of piecing disparate memories together in verse. Obviously struggling with a memory circumscribed by agony, the poet manages to “translate” his crisis into language in subsequent lines, as well as in other poems in the collection. By this, he gives his pain a “symbolic expression as an unfolding drama of self and the forces that assail it” (Orr, 2002: 4), which usually initiates healing process.
This is a poet who sees “political platitudes, official bulletins, and media sound bites” (9) in response to the anguish inflicted by Hurricane Katrina on him and the people of New Orleans as a mockery of his pain. It is therefore understandable to find his response to such “mockery” laced with some indignation and a sense of additional injury. Apparently smarting from the original pain of loss and angered by lack of a “genuine institutional interest in and concern about the specific depth and range [of his] loss/pain” (9), the poet also makes recourse to invectives and revolting imagery in composing a “fitting” anthem for Katrina. The hurricane is described as being “swollen with filth and fecal froth… | heavy with stench and rancid smell” (14). This resort to verbal indecency in poetry is what Ana Ljubinkovic (2010: 137–138) has equated with a quest for justice “through speech vendetta”, which means using “verses that insult or bring misfortune upon the adversary group” with a view to achieving a sense of justice. In other words, Osundare hopes to obtain psychological relief through this verbal attack on those he considers the agents of his distress. The hurricane is also described as “Author of the plague and total pain” (14), as one who took the joy of a baby away the other day, and as the one who caused a lonely widow pain. As the poet’s remonstrations also inculpate Katrina in the pain and sorrow of other residents of New Orleans, his voice can only be understood as partly representative of those many voices of the victims of the disaster. Not unexpectedly, with his recourse to such scatological imagery as above, his pain transmutes into both aversion to and revulsion for the Katrina experience.
This transmutation, which may be an attempt by the poet to get rid of the pain and the gnawing rage in him, is synonymous with the psychoanalytic idea of transference. With the transfer of these insidious feelings into something as repellant as the foregoing images suggest, the poet’s hope for psychological relief becomes easier. However, the allusion to Hurricane Katrina as “Author of the plague” further suggests an attempt to underscore the fact that the agony that came in the wake of the disaster affected not just the poet, but many others. Like the plague visited on the biblical Egyptians in different forms, Hurricane Katrina affected the people of New Orleans in different ways. Some suffered bereavement, some suffered bodily harm, others loss of property, and so forth. Directly, indirectly, or vicariously, most of the people of the city, like the poet, suffered some kind of pain.
Whereas “Katrina Anthem” makes much of emotional and psychological pain, many other poems in the poetry volume explore the physical dimension of pain. Metaphorically, the city of New Orleans is presented as having suffered “severed loins” and “broken ribs” in the “fatal grip” of Katrina. In addition to this evocation of imagery of violence, the poem also inscribes pain as an experiential phenomenon that sometimes results from ripping apart an otherwise organic body. Although this dismembering of body parts, with its concomitant physical pain, is metaphorical, it is nevertheless factual that some individual victims of the Katrina disaster suffered bodily injury. While the poet did not suffer serious bodily harm or bereavement during the catastrophe, his witnessing of the same is attested to in the poem entitled “Postmortem” where, for instance, reference is made to a six-year old who suffered “contorted fingers” and was killed, and a grandmother who got drowned in her wheelchair.
The depth of pain the poet-persona experienced as a victim of Katrina cataclysm is, in fact, lavishly recorded in many other poems in the collection. From “Omiyale”, “Pedigree”, “The Language of Pain”, “The Weeping Book”, “Mares of Night”, and “Losses 1”, to “Losses 2”, the conception of pain beyond physical sensation is brought into greater and sharper relief. In these particular poems, the palpably distressing emotional and psychic wounds suffered by the poet and others are explored.
The poem “Omiyale” borrows its title from the flood disaster that befell Ibadan, a city in southwestern Nigeria, in 1980. Like the flood resulting from the break of levees during the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, the Omiyale flood tragedy happened when the Ogunpa River in Ibadan burst its banks. This allusion to the Ibadan disaster must have been informed by the shared enormity of the tragic intensity of the two catastrophes. Though not as fatal as Katrina tragedy, the Ibadan disaster left in its wake over 50,000 people homeless, and over 200 dead. It is probably the worst in the history of flood disasters in Nigeria to this date. The poetic persona’s pain, easily evident in the threnodic tenor that suffuses the poem, is further made palpable in the lament over his personal losses to the flood that ravaged his homestead. Paintings, books, and favourite garments are some of the precious and probably irreplaceable valuables the poet lost to the flood. For a creative artist, who is also a visual art connoisseur, losing a collection of paintings and manuscripts of ongoing creative works must have been a very painful and traumatic experience. Even when such valuables are “replaced”, the replacement can hardly be of the same value, or capable of getting rid of the painful void or nostalgia for the original possessions. Consequent on this psychic wound and frustration, the poet resorts to name-calling, describing the hurricane-induced flood as “monster”, “burglar”, “felon”, and “greedy” fellow. Again, the motivation behind this recourse to invectives and name-calling can be traced to “speech vendetta” (Ljubinkovic, 2010: 137–138).. By this act, the poet indulges in an advertent transfer of frustration, while subconsciously hoping for some relief.
If the pain inflicted by the hurricane on the poetic persona is psychically wounding, the pain visited on others is no less so. In “Pedigree”, metaphors are deployed that invite attention to the psychosomatic illnesses the Katrina experience caused in many other people. A certain grandfather is said to hear her “granddaughter’s echoes” in Katrina’s howl, while a mother is able to discern a “killsome cornea” of his son in the storm’s eye. These metaphorical renderings are used to call attention to the tragic disorientation suffered by these caregivers following the loss of these children to the disaster. To further emphasize the intensity of the pain inflicted on the people of New Orleans, which the poet also shares and which engenders this kind of hallucination, he deploys both direct and indirect comparisons: So many horses of pain have galloped through these shores each with its own aftermath Of blood and tears but none has left hoofprints as deep and wide as Katrina’s scars (21)
Though pain is generally inscribed in City Without People as an undesirable physical and psychological experience, the poet and the people of New Orleans are figuratively depicted in this poem as having suffered a continual exposure to forbidding sensations of pain with equanimity in the past. Such dictions as “horses of pain”, “blood and tears”, and “deep and wide” draw attention to this. In particular, the comparison objectified in the last line of the excerpt above is made to emphasize the force and pervasiveness of how Katrina wrought its pain “deep and wide”. There is also the inherent notion that the memory of the pain in question would linger forever, for scars, as perpetual signifiers of an erstwhile wound, never fade completely.
Fortunately, this unsavoury observation is later mitigated in some other poems in the later part of the collection. In “The Language of Pain”, the poet attempts to articulate a universal dimension in the expression of pain as a physical as well as psychological experience. Following the physical pain he suffered due to the flood that devastated his homestead, echoed in the idea of “muscle of the soul” and its “spasms” (57), the poet’s psychological distress is also hinted at in the phrase “jarring nerves” (57). This suggests that while a terrible physical pain was inflicted on the poet, his psyche was also dealt some blow, a view that highlights some kind of fluid interaction between physical and psychical realms. The poet also observes that a condition of pain usually drags time in the perception of its victim, especially at night. He adds that though others may see the cause of pain, only the sufferer of pain knows how it feels. This view clearly resonates with the British Pain Society’s (2020: n.p.) observation that “[p]ain is what the person feeling it says it is”.
In one of the poems, Osundare theorizes that “The longitude of loss plays vital | Games with the latitude of laughter” (57). The muted import of these lines — the possibility that loss is at the roots of the psychic pain suffered by the poet — is coextensive with the kernel of a number of other poems in the collection. This is demonstrable, for instance, in “The Weeping Book”, one of a number of poems that sensitively inscribe the anguish of the poet’s loss in the poetry collection. It is a highly lyrical piece, comprising seven quatrains. While two of the quatrains simultaneously limn and lionize the invaluable essence of one of the books that belongs to the poet, the remaining five depict the destruction of another book, apparently a manuscript, and the pain this caused its owner. In order to properly appreciate the value the poet places on these books, it helps to quote two quatrains from the poem at length: A prattling price once, and very smart With gems of wisdom from every part It sparkled with science and golden words That sang and surged like magic birds My constant consort, my fairest friend Beyond every fad and fickle trend It stood sane, secure on my crowded shelf A lively boost to my seeking self (58)
To know that the poet treasures the book this way is to also have an idea of how its loss may be perceived. As the treasure is ripped apart “from page to page” and eventually “submerged in Katrina’s woes” (58), the poet’s “house of mirth” is undone, while the “lively girth” it affords him is also lost. However, it is not until the last quatrain that the poet’s pain and grief are sorely and acutely articulated. The loss of the book is considered a “grave bereavement” and “a mournful miss”. How else could the loss of “a whole life’s labour” have been described? Of particular interest in this threnodic and painful inscription, however, is the metaphor with which the poet captures his experience. He discreetly likens himself to a mother who went into a vain labour or whose baby suffers accidental abortion at just about the end of gestation term. As a creative artist, Osundare’s poems and poetry books are his creations: his children too, to put it figuratively. His recourse to this natal imagery to capture his pain in the last stanza is, therefore, of great significance. The unpleasant sensations associated with childbirth are generally recognized as one of the most intense physical pains that exist. Meanwhile the negative emotion that attaches to the death of a child is, no doubt, one of the most excruciating psychic pains human beings can undergo. In fact, in Africa, where peoples’ beliefs about a person’s continued relevance in this life and the afterlife is tied to biological reproduction, the poet’s choice of metaphor and imagery is apropos. To be left without or to not have any offspring in life is one of the most painful and shameful experiences for an African adult in the society of yore, and even for those who still believe in and live such traditional values today. As an African, if Osundare subscribes to this view, then his pain must have been very deep.
Though with insubstantial variations, “Mares of Night”, “Losses (1)”, and “Losses (2)” are some of the other poems that also advance the notion of loss as the source of the poet’s pain. “Mares of Night”, for instance, poetizes the painful memories that come with remembering the loss of “treasured tomes”. The memories, which come at night, first assaulted the poet on 16 September 2005 while taking refuge at a friend’s house in Rindge, New Hampshire, some weeks after surviving the Katrina disaster. The memories depicted in the poem create images that are as surreal as they are frightening. Yet the linguistic expression of pain itself is muffled, as if the poet finds it unspeakable. In the poems are inscriptions of frightening dreams he endures every night shortly after the catastrophe. Typically, a nightmare leaves its victim distraught, if not both distraught and screaming. Instead of diction suggesting these tendencies, one only gets intimations of resignation and quietness, as easily gestured towards by phrases such as “leaden shrouds”, “skeletal sighs”, and “disembodied whispers” (59), all of which are used to describe lost valuables.
“Losses (1)” and “Losses (2)”, alongside “With the Nib of a Borrowed Pen”, also lament the poet’s intellectual and material losses, and the contingent pain these losses cause. The fixation on pain in these poems and others has been read by Tosin Gbogi (2016: 476) as constituting a kind of thematic stasis, which undermines the anticipated progression in the collection. Indeed, while this may appear correct, the critic downplays the enormity and gravity of the experience that motivated the composition in the first instance. In the words of the poet, the devastation of the Katrina experience necessitated “a testimony that transcends trivial versification and verbal placebos” (9). Put differently, what the critic considers a thematic stasis should be seen as either a wilful thematic insistence on the part of the poet or a repetition compulsion associated with traumatic memory. As implied in the poet’s words here, the subject matter and its execution require the kind of seriousness which the repeated emphasis on pain is supposed to make self-evident. In fact, by this seemingly unnecessary fixation on pain page after page, specifically in the initial sections of the collection, the poet-persona is deliberately providing details of his emotional frustration and mental distress. He links the same to different specific incidents associated with Hurricane Katrina, as a way of expressing his anguish.
In Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, Pennebaker (1997) emphasizes the role of expressive writing in healing. Similarly, Smyth and Hockemeyer (2008), in a study of asthmatic and rheumatoid patients who engaged in expressive writing, also highlight the contribution of expressive writing to healing while observing the significant reduction in the pain of patients who kept a journal and link emotions to events. Research by scholars, such as Louise DeSalvo (2000) and Marian MacCurdy (2000) have equally validated the healing power of writing. However, while writing about a certain condition or pain is not in itself necessarily healing, it can unwittingly gesture in this direction if the writing is carried out by the victim of the experience. However, it is the specific aspect of the experience or the condition that a writer focuses on, and how they engage with this, that ultimately facilitates healing. Thus, the next section of this article engages with the latter section of City Without People, where the poet reflectively reviews his pain and tries to make sense of it, while also focusing on gratitude, others’ compassion and support, and a general air of positivity.
Healing by “writing through” pain
The idea of “writing out and writing through” illness was originally used by Henke (2000) in her research into women’s life writing. She used the idea to describe what is today technically known as scriptotherapy in the emergent field of medical humanities. In the introduction to Shattered Subjects, she observes that scriptotherapy can be a good substitute for psychoanalysis as a means of healing or recovery from trauma. Psychoanalysis had been formulated and adopted by Freud as a therapy or means of managing repressed emotions, repressed memories, anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges. Other researchers have also drawn insights from psychoanalysis to deepen the body of knowledge pertaining to the management of emotional and mental health issues. For instance, trauma theorists who have also offered views about healing, such as Caruth (1996), Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman (1992), and Judith Herman (1992), trace some of the insights in their works to Freud. The same applies to the idea of expressive therapy and writing cure, as advocated by Pennebaker (2004) and Gillie Bolton and Jeannie Wright (2004), respectively. Expressive writing and talking cures are just alternative terms for describing scriptotherapy. Common to all these nomenclatures and approaches is the idea of verbalization, which is also considered crucial to diagnosis and healing in orthodox medicine.
Henke’s belief that writing or narrating pain, or other traumatic experiences, offers some kind of balm to soothe any unwholesome sensation or emotion in the body or the mind has continued to gain acceptance. It is particularly interesting that clinical psychologists and scientists have also subscribed to this idea. For instance, Smyth and Jill Hockemeyer (2008) have observed that writing about pain and stress can mitigate the level of stress hormones like cortisol in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. Pennebaker (2004) has equally observed that such writings can serve complementary purposes while administering traditionally orthodox therapies. This section of the article hopes to demonstrate how, by moving from pain narration to sublimation, Osundare is able to bring closure to his tragic experience at the hands of Hurricane Katrina in order to reconcile with his painful losses. As earlier intimated, pain narration in this article is synonymous with “acting out” the pain experience, which I describe as “writing out” because of the mode of presentation. On the other hand, pain sublimation denotes a positive processing of the painful experience in order to attain wellness, which I describe as “writing through” in the sub-heading above.
Conceived primarily as testimonial literature, a literature that “allows the author to share an unutterable tale of pain and suffering” (Henke, 2000: xix), Osundare also uses some lines in his verse to excoriate authorities for failure to respond to the Katrina disaster promptly, and thereby inflicting untold pain on the people of New Orleans. However, while it is pertinent to note that the testimonial nature of the collection offers the poet some measure of purgation of anger, bitterness, and mental distress resulting from the poor handling of the disaster by the government of the United States, Osundare takes additional steps in his versification to further self-healing from the grave pain suffered at the hands of Katrina by reviewing the experience, taking heart from, and sometimes basking in the well-wishes, love, compassion, and filial devotion of family and friends.
One of the poems with healing potential for the writer is entitled “Solace”. Obviously inspired by the familial devotion of daughter to father, the poem is interestingly dedicated to the daughter by the father. Assuming the voice of the daughter, the poet intones at the beginning of the poem, “Take heart, | Daddy mine”, and concludes, “I regret our loss | I celebrate our LIFE”. These are profoundly touching lines, particularly profound for their ironic implication. Ordinarily, one would have expected this soothing and wise counsel to come from the father to the daughter, and not vice versa. That it occurs in a reversed sense, however, does not detract from the father’s wisdom and profundity of thought too. His inability to immediately see the tragedy the way the daughter does is most likely informed by the shock of the event in the first instance, and the frustration that comes with what he later describes elsewhere as “unspeakable loss” and “unbearable cross” (46). To obtain a clear insight into the depth of the daughter’s thoughts, I quote some of the lines as follows: We lost our house But not our home We lost our books But not our brains We lost our shoes But not our feet You lost some songs But not your voice (68)
From these lines, one can see that it is not only the poet that suffers loss, but that the entire family do. However, the fact that the daughter could see the disaster from this philosophical perspective is highly reflective of her wisdom and thoughtfulness. While she readily makes peace of mind for herself by reconciling with the reality of the losses, these soothing comments offer the father the opportunity to see his plight in a new light: to see hope and comfort where despair and anguish appear to lie. In fact, according to him, the wise words of the daughter ‘took away some of Katrina’s sting” (68). Consequently, the poet’s objective reflection on the Katrina disaster, incited by her daughter’s insight, gestures him steadily in the direction of wellness.
As earlier hinted, the vector of Osundare’s mental agony, following the Katrina tragedy, is his losses, which are mainly intellectual and material in form. While the material losses include garments, books, and other household items, the intellectual ones are basically creative inventions recorded in manuscripts. There is also the emotional aspect to loss, which includes the loss of warmth, laughter, and happiness. To argue that material losses could not have caused the poet much pain may well be correct, especially since replacements of such losses can easily accelerate the healing process of pains rooted specifically in such losses. For the poet, this, indeed, seems to be the case, as he draws balm from many gestures of gifts from friends and family. However, some material items or property, when lost, have capacity to incite psychological distress.
In “Enia Lasoo Mi”, the poet takes delivery of garments of different kinds from friends around the world to meet one of his basic needs after the disaster — clothing. As evident in a number of poems in the collection, the loss of his wardrobe had been one of Osundare’s painful losses to Katrina. However, the pain over this loss may have little or nothing to do with want of garments to put on, but about the type. Osundare is well known for always wearing his cultural heart on his sleeves, always bearing his African/Yoruba identity and consciousness in his dress proudly. He is either sporting buba or danshiki, 3 made of African materials locally called aso-oke 4 or Africanized fabrics like adire 5 and the like, atop a Western style pair of trousers, which is hardly noticeable. These kinds of clothing materials are not the type readily available in boutiques or garment stores in the United States. Besides, the loss of a wardrobe cultivated mainly for reasons of cultural pride and identity may result in identity crisis and cultural rootlessness, conditions that can also induce some mental distress or trauma. Following the relief sourced from these gifts, Osundare puts on the “new garments | with grateful pride, thumping…[his] | Well-clad nose at Katrina’s stripping catastrophe” (77). In other words, through the replacement of such lost cultural signifiers, the poet experiences a feeling of profound gratitude, which inexorably positions him to bring closure to the psychic anguish which the Katrina tragedy caused him.
In another poem, Osundare takes comfort in “the bouquet of books” from Dave Brinks and a “capacious package… bearing books and other direly needed things” from The Sable Clan. For a distinguished professor and globally-renowned creative writer, what can be more precious than books? For a literary artist, what becomes of life without books? If the mind and the soul of the intellectual man of letters feed mostly on books and ideas, it is logical to expect that Osundare can only be fully restore to life after the Katrina disaster by having printed matters to feed his mind on. By focusing on kind gestures such as these, and the people who make them possible, the poet is trying to see light at the end of a dark tunnel, thereby cultivating gradual restoration to normal life.
While the foregoing afford the poet a means to mitigate the pain and grief occasioned by Hurricane Katrina, emotionally, he also appropriates the well-wishes, love, and messages of compassion sent to him by friends and associates as a means of working through his pain in the poem entitled “Katrina Will Not Have the Last Word”. Drawing fortitude and warmth from what he variously describes as the “rippling generosity from | The depth of the Slovene heart” (79), the “munificence and care” (79) of Ogun’s scion, the “healing words” (80) from UP SCHOOL, the “countless kindness | Of the Blanton Bunch”, “a kindly chattering and soothing song” from the Bearded Sugarman of Ibadan, and “the therapeutic laughter | Of the Poet Who (Never) Lied”, Osundare underscores how these gestures and similar ones helped to stabilize him psychologically. Without curative magic about them, these words bear a reassurance of goodwill and an extension of warmth and wellness to a soul and mind in dire need of the same. This effusive compassion and goodwill easily illustrates the idea invoked by the poet when he says “Enia Lasoo mi”, which literally means “people are my source of comfort”. As further evidence of this, the poet moved with his family to a friend’s place, where there is “enough love & laughter… | To disperse that memory of | The deadly storm” (84). Indeed, Katrina did not have the last word.
In the poet’s management of his pains, his mother’s devotion and expressions of love and care provide sources of palliation and balm. He recalls a dream conversation with his mother seven nights after the storm in “What Mother Said”, a piece suffused with prayers, incantations, philosophical nuggets, and panegyrics, each of which is believed to possess healing potentials in the African belief system. Among the Yoruba, Osundare’s African ethnic root, prayer is highly treasured. Prayer is believed to have soothing effects on the psyche of people. This is best illustrated in the Yoruba saying adua tu ni lara ju epe lo (prayer is more heartening than curse). Recourse is usually made to this saying when a prayer text is considered shallow. In other words, they believe that no matter how shallow or short a text of prayer is, it is better than a curse. Besides, the Yoruba generally see prayer as a source of hope and comfort to both the sick and the healthy. Therefore, drawing from the promise of hope and comfort inherent in his mother’s prayers, the poet inscribes some of the prayers as a means to process his pains. Here are some of them: You will not go the way of the mud Before the harvestide Your head was molded from the firmest clay It will never crack like a paper dome Obatala is not asleep, my Son He will never let the work of his hand Dissolve in a strange and surging flood (96–97)
The mother’s repeated use of a modal verb with some strong measure of certainty, and “will”, strengthens the capacity of these prayerful wishes to assure the poet-son. In another prayer, which doubles as incantation, the mother declaims: May your path be clear The eagle finds its niche on the tallest tree When the earthworm pays its homage The earth opens its doors for it The sea may seethe/boil The lake may swell Oluibu will find her way Through the wildest waters Freely does the hen dance Through a thicket of thorns Freely (101)
With its incantatory force, the prayers here offer therapeutic potentials to the poet. His recall of the voice and the text of his mother’s prayers also bring relief to him. The forceful tonality of the incantation here resonates with Robert Ratliff’s view that story, symbol, and incantation are the “three abiding and primordial powers that shape language into poetry” (2018: 94). Besides, the force of assurance that usually attends the use of incantation as a prophylactic or curative medicine in traditional African medicine is clearly unmistakable in the diction deployed in the prayer, especially the shift from the modal auxiliary verb ‘may’ to ‘will’. Apparently to further emphasize or energize the potency of this incantation, it is used as a refrain through a three quarter of the poem.
The poet’s healing from the pain of Katrina tragedy is also partly obtained from the philosophical counsels of her mother, as recorded in “What Mother Said”. The poet quotes his mother as follows: The day I lost my only daughter: Omi nii danu Only the water has spilled Uwowoo fo The gourd is still intact Erun oko ni ya sonu The hoe has lost its blade Alagbede ti ku But the blacksmith is still alive There is no night so dark That it does not end in some kind of dawn No sorrow so profound That it does not leave room For a few streaks of laughter Look through the window Of your house of sadness Behold the lawn and the sprouting grass (104)
These nuggets recall the spirit of encouragement and the psychological balm administered by the poet’s daughter, in filial devotion, to her father in another poem cited earlier. Like the daughter, the mother recognizes the pain the poet-son is going through, but points in the direction of hope by offering him reasons not to feel trapped in the pain of the moment. Obviously to give her plea a weighty force, knowing how greatly the poet treasures his lost books, the mother uses the loss of her own daughter as a point of departure and consolation reference. These gestures, no doubt, must have afforded the poet some relief when they were experientially made and received. However, since pains triggered by a traumatic experience often recur, one of the ways by which to overcome them is to imaginatively write about them, a practice alluded to earlier as expressive writing (Pennebaker, 2004). This is what Osundare has done in City Without People. In the latter part of the collection in particular, the overwhelming positive tonality of the poems, as well as the ambience of optimism with which they are suffused are clear enablers of restoration to wellness for the poet.
Conclusion
Osundare’s thematization of pain in City Without People is marked by a significant literal and figurative kinesis: from a physically chaotic and flooded home, through a mentally and emotionally painful state, to an ordered understanding and reconciliation with the tragedy wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Though the pain and the distress the poet went through were deeply personal, he links them to the collective pain of the people of New Orleans on occasions. Thus, while the Katrina losses and their concomitant pain unwittingly become sources of artistic inspiration for the poet, he also appropriates the gesture of writing to unburden his psychological distress, thereby consciously and unconsciously but steadily writing himself into wellness. He does this by reflecting on his painful experience: focusing on its positive aspects, while also obtaining comfort from the balmy words and expressions of love and compassion from family and friends. This paradox of using pain to birth writing and using writing to kill pain, while demonstrating Osundare’s imaginative fecundity, also affirms the medical potentials of expressive writing or scriptotherapy in modern African literature. Although the collection drew its afflatus from an American experience, and obviously targeted at American audience, City Without People consolidates on Osundare’s appropriation of writing to cultivate wellness (scriptotherapy), an act he inaugurated in modern Nigerian poetry with Moonsongs in 1988.
