Tag Archive for: Nigerian Poetry

Tuesday Poem by Peter Akinlabi

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A Failure of Speech

A surfeit of light throws
Dark images onto the walls–

An unfamiliar thing stretches
In a glut of obstacles
Between our two shadows

On the radio, a song calls nobody’s attention
To the silent way of ruins–

When we fail at speech words become
Mined or maimed–

Our shadows rise onto each other in bad cheers
Disregarding the place of air in language

We imagine happiness and our bodies adopt
The shape of its distance–

Nothing more resembles the sounds
Of crumbling walls than the plosions
Of water tumbling by, you once said

Now I imagine the solitude of objects
Caught in a flood–

And memory is the intense eye trailing
Detritus with a bespoke impairment

Tuesday Poem by Kechi Nomu

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WATERWALLS

 

It begins with Kahlo in a picture

here, she is letting her eyebrows grow 

into themselves. & here too, a boy

does not see how he breaks your heart

he citizen, you foreigner standing only inches from him.

 

Like the necessity of shadows overlapping

he says into Kahlo’s face

The lighting here is good for pictures

so that inside you feel what it is

your ship sinking . . .your sea caving under the weight of dreams

& these waterwalls in a chest of flesh.

 

Some days, they rise so high

it is impossible not to feel what you are or

see, again, how a Pharaoh drowns running away

from his waterwalls towards you,

without chariots

how a woman waits on the border

to cross a red (already) sea

without her staff&papers.

 

Here, you see this standing so close

to the length of your own shadow

so close you know what it feels like: 

 

All the caves of a body’s silence . . .

Waterwalls

 

It begins with Kahlo in a picture

here, she is letting her eyebrows grow 

into themselves. & here too, a boy

does not see how he breaks your heart

he citizen, you foreigner standing only inches from him.

 

Like the necessity of shadows overlapping

he says into Kahlo’s face

The lighting here is good for pictures

so that inside you feel what it is

your ship sinking…your sea caving under the weight of dreams

& these waterwalls in a chest of flesh.

 

Some days, they rise so high

it is impossible not to feel what you are or

see, again, how a Pharaoh drowns running away

from his waterwalls towards you,

without chariots

how a woman waits on the border

to cross a red (already) sea

without her staff&papers.

 

Here, you see this standing so close

to the length of your own shadow

so close you know what it feels like: 

 

All the caves of a body’s silence . . .

______

Kechi Nomu is a writer and editor. She tweets @KemNomu

Tuesday Poem by Afolabi Boluwatife

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My lover said her blouse
is tight around her chest,
that the air around is too heavy
for her to breathe.

I think about a thousand things
two idle hands can do to a woman
with an aching heart under the
blanket of the night:

1.
From below,
lift attire (the way the wind would)
slide two fingers up oily skin
ignoring gravity, ignoring Physics
up
up
till they get to a temple bounded
by a pair of angels,
kneel to worship,
mould tongue into a snake,
pray lust away-
passionately,
till a river begins to flow from
the throne of mercy,
till her mouth becomes a well
of glossolalia.

2.
Turn her against blind wall,
face first
separate cloth and flesh.
From behind-
stretch forth two hands,
each shaped into a bowl
to eclipse two full moons
dangling from a body,
attempt to squeeze light out of mounds
of fat
slowly at first,
in rhythm
out of rhythm
till
till two bodies burst into a lake of fire.

Guest Poem by Timi Akegbejo

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Note: Those who are familiar with my work will know that I am obsessed with daybreak.

DAWN

I am awake
The world isn’t

fiddling with thoughts
Wrestling with words

bidding them to come lay
on the blank sheet staring at me

rubbing tired eyes
in echoing silence

But
this silence fawns

soonest, dawn comes
And now is upon all

Rooster crows
Muezzin calls: Allahu Akbar

Sun itching to rise
Dawn is here

_________

Timi Akegbejo is a Nigerian poet and blogger.

 

 

Guest Poems by Moyo Orimoloye

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  1. Love is a plot device and your insecticide is not 

    And when you design

    The ultimate insecticide,

    You’ll tell me about malaria,

    And how I never have to worry

    About artemether,

    About lumefantrine,

    Ever again.

     

    And I’ll tell you about my lover,

    How she runs her fingers

    Through these bumps at night.

    How she pretends these mosquito bites

    Are nothing but bullet wounds.

    How she asks with feigned concern,

    Where did you get these?

    How I wince as I say Kosovo-

    ’98-

    We were outnumbered…

 

2. Ode to Encryption

When I came across you,

Empty as a curfew,

As dry as an outside joke,

I gripped the toilet paper tighter.

I felt the need to thank you.

But for the urgency in my bowels,

I would have knelt beside you,

Hugged you,

Kissed your dryness wet.

 

When I dropped the last bolus,

I felt the need to hide you,

To protect you,

But you swore by inertia to never leave.

To never surrender to another.

 

The next day I returned to you,

Same time.

And I met you intact.

I began to think I was missing a screw.

Maybe you were just in my head,

A figment of my hopes.

 

But you responded in Archimedes,

With your water levels rising with each bolus,

You responded in Newton,

Splashing water on my butt with each bolus.

_______

Moyosore Orimoloye drinks Orijin because beer is bitter and he still really loves coke. He also writes poetry.

 

Guest Poem by Loni Toyosi

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To sacrifice magic for personal vanity
Is neither my credo
Nor Kyrie.
So I could not spill those words;
I vomited them.
And now I wish the puke held bay
At the dock of my feet.

Instead, it greased through
Where dexterous wooing had ricocheted
Sliding into the friction betwixt soul and spirit.

Somehow it melted away,
Corroding.
The diamantine bars of your heart came ajar,
Your gaze softened;
The whip lost it’s steely sternness.

Now your eyes quake
In awe of my voice:
The contact lens in complete disarray
As the seed of untruth
Sprouted amidst cosmetic plastic.

A three-word incantation
Has made hard water lather.

____________

Loni Toyosi loves Hip-pop.

Violence and Victories: On Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone

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The Ascent Stone is a marriage of two volumes of poems—Length of Eyes and Pearl of Mangroves—both by Obari Gomba, a poet with an obsessive fascination with human anatomy, couplets and the Niger Delta.

 These twin collections are like two sides of a coin. They frolic with different concerns, are mediated by different styles, form, manner and method. They, in short, exist on different ends of a spectrum and do not share a lasting mood: while the voice in Length is more textured, matured and modulated; the voice of Pearl is rash, brazen and tempestuous. There is however hardly a marked dissimilarity in the issues engendered in both collections but Length wears on its sleeves a grace brought along by years of practicing craft.

 Pearls of Mangroves is a disturbing collection borne out of perilous anguish. It is a book of lamentations, of frustrations, of anger. The book speaks to, for and about the Niger Delta situation. The Niger Delta has been described as a gift as well as a curse. It is a gift in that it sustains the Nigerian State and a curse for it suffers lack, neglect, decline, pollution and poverty of her people regardless of her role in enriching the nation.

The poet’s fascination with anatomy kicks out a worn metaphor—that of a woman. The Niger Delta as a woman is the crux of many realized poems in this collection. With the lucid image of a woman as a grand metaphor, one cannot run out of ways of violating the Niger Delta. Nakedness is recurring. So also is rape, pussy, menses, pain, suffering, ashes, tears,  wounds, corpses, butchery and debauchery of dreams, helpless children, violence all drowning in endless murky waters with a thin skin of crude oil atop as veil.

 “Old dragons roar as they ravage the river

 New tears fall where old ones never run dry”

The names of oil towns, tribes, districts are deployed at will. Ogoni. Odi. Oloi-biri. Umuechem. Not for the need to activate sentiments but to lament the decline and decay of land. The Niger Delta is expendable fodder for world development and sustenance.

“The world dances on our skulls

 Foul is fair in the politics of Oil”

“But faraway in London and Washington

 Their oil lubricates power and sex”

 There is a strong presence of the slain environmentalist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was martyred for the Niger Delta cause by Ray-Ban wearing despot, Abacha. There seems to be an unbiased fondness when the poet says of him,

“You are not a saint;

  You are not a villain.

  You are just a true tragedian.

  Love is your hamartia.”

In the strength of the poet’s despair and lament, there seems to be incarnation of what Wiwa stood for, perhaps this is why Ken Saro-Wiwa’s influence, story, essence lingers all over the collection. Recollection is not only an antidote for amnesia; the poet says this very profoundly in pg. 165,

“Memory is chlorophyll

  In the Face of the sun”

And the memories of Niger Delta in this volume are not lofty; they are toxic, torn, tragic. And once remembrance is achieved, resistance creeps in. Resistance is protest put to purpose in the Journal of a Militant, an epic poem, which might have been better realized in prose.

Militancy is inevitable in the natural history of the Niger Delta situation. Mindless rape, wreckage, toxic havoc cannot persist without some sort of confrontation and resistance. The poet has chosen poetry to confront these disturbing issues and is often besotted by the rage and the anguish of his memories. His memories are flooded by negative images of the Niger Delta and this might stand to reason as the poet is a native of the Niger Delta born long after the oil exploration had begun. Perhaps this is why there are no fond memories except that of the poet’s father and sea shells, the eponymous Pearls of the Mangrove.

I would have loved to read more fond memories of the Niger Delta music, cuisines, norms; their lives before it was tainted by oil but fond memories are not what this book is made of. Like all poets of the Niger Delta extraction, Obari Gomba in Pearls is fixated on the helpless fate of the land.

Length of Eyes, for obvious reasons, makes for a better reading. It is less disturbing, more methodical and flaunts a confidence that does not betray emotions, unlike Pearls. Divided into three sections, each section grapples with a range of clustered themes.

The first are paeans on a bevy of the poet’s favourite thinkers amongst which are novelists, thinkers, lawyers, philosophers and environmentalists tied together by professional success and strength of character.

An elegy is written in the memory of Bola Ige, slain attorney-general of Nigeria, whose killers have remained at large. It is an inquest on the rationale of some of the late statesman’s allegiances which may or may not have hastened his death from unnatural causes.  A powerful metaphor that borrows from seed germination is recruited in the poem Die, Maathai Wangari. Death becomes a first step towards germination, a phoenix-like resurrection that makes for beautiful imagery. The great environmentalist is prodded to die so that she can grow into a plant. This is the enduring tendency of Length: a boyish playfulness that abides even when dealing with serious themes, and, of course, a consummate love for human anatomy. Many times reportage and history flirts with the poems but the poems only become realized when they deal  in the delight of human anatomy.

“On the tongue. O not from

  Those famous errant breasts of yours”

“In full tide. A new horn

Is keen at the cervix”

“…Huge penises

  Turgid with lust”

The second section deals with the poet and his internal crises which stems from the practice of his craft; his bogus attempts at creation, his victories, if you may, when he succeeds and his anguish, when he fails.

Arguably, the poet is a god. Little wonder, religious allusions and imagery abound in this section, but in the core of his poetics is a jaunty sense of word play. 

In the last two sections, the poet glories and glows in politics and history. Terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, Military rule, Arab springs and the dominance of America is grappled with, with wit.

 The poet pays meticulous care to form, expressing himself in free verse, deploying staggering enjambment but the discovery of the potency of couplets remains the most important of his victories.

 Length might be an unconscious response to Pearls’ reception. Even though gloomy issues are delved into, the voice in Length comes across as tempered and well-mannered when compared to the raw anger in Pearls.

 Time modulates many things, a poet’s voice inclusive.

THE ANATOMY OF A BARD’S VOICE: A REVIEW

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Title: Daybreak and Other Poems

Author: Dami Ajayi

Publisher: Saraba Magazine

Year: 2013

daybreak cover art

 

Reading Daybreak, I remembered one of those sunny afternoons listening to Dami Ajayi at a monthly seminar organised by Prof. Gbemisola Adeoti held at Pit Theatre, Ife. I understood his discovery of talent beyond literalism; his deviation into the world of creativity exudes fizzy brilliance. I am prefaced with the thought that Dami Ajayi is one of the medics who seeks wedlock between the clinical and the literary. This is obvious in the clinical rawness of his language. His linguistic adventures sometimes crave understanding. But most importantly, it augments my tactile memories of what sexuality prescribes, reading through Daybreak and Other Poems. There is the Damisque soloist voice: the rarity of his penmanship is a way of asserting himself before the legion of contemporary poets of his time. The percentile of blurbs written on the chapbook shows the strength of his verse.

I can hardly quantify the eccentricity of Farad’s author, Emmanuel Iduma, who drew a perimeter of his thoughts on the poet and the uniqueness of the “Daybreak” and its sister poems. The NLNG 2013 Literature Prize Winner, Tade Ipadeola, also offered a few words on the importance of these poems.

The break of the day is a trivial thing with universal exertions. In Iduma’s words: “It is like the dawn talking with the dusk because dusk knows what the dawn does not know about today.” The chapbook is not only loose on the birthing of thought and the dream or the pregnant night, but explores memories of romance and sensuality and sexuality as well. The poem, “Amaokpala East-side Motel”, Ajayi wings in on memories of a brothel’s clientele. The poet manages a clinical explanation around sexuality, giving us a statistical analysis with the encounter of sex in the society. The poem exfoliates the horror of keeping one’s urges daring you to slake it, to answer the habitual call of sexual urge when it calls. It is not a ploy to malign sex workers; no, it is a clarion call to see sexuality and its commercialization as acceptable. Sex now becomes a milestone in a nation’s economy. The body is the factory, the ‘repository of nether fluid’ (the machine), and the satisfaction of the production is consummated in the ‘warmth’. The production is not un-becoming but it is an end to means by the ‘Femme Fatale’:

When she comes in and lets her dress drop

                        You bask in the warmth of impending explosions

                       One more footnote in her history

                       One more mile in a long, long way.

 

Hence, in the intercourse itself, Dami melds humanity with the drop of the metaphor ‘explosion’; it is a way of lengthening her history coursing through humanity: ‘One more footnote in her history.’ Each man the ‘Femme Fatale’ meets/mates becomes part of her humanity, history, vice versa.

And “You’re my Flagellation” is for ‘those in touch with their feelings’. It is a call from the pulpit of love. Dami comes through with a clear voice to speak about the illusions created around love. The poet champions an effort to give contemporary feel to Freudian complexes and other anthems of love of yore.

Ajayi introduces modernity to love: the communication through social network, and the gadget itself, the love spreading through existence of cyberspace, feelings morphing into the virtual. The ‘crooners’, like everybody else, are victims, even the poet is not exempted:

    I have started the poem baby, it is you and I

                        Holding hands, strolling into the sunset.

 

The ‘You’ itself is a pronominal choice of universalising Dami’s language and message.

“Daybreak” ushers us into another world of freshness. It is like the coming of a newborn. It ‘expunges’ our thoughts, buries old desires and anxieties. The poem is a metaphorical playlet refracting the dreadness of the night, and the hope of a new day; Dami checkmates the character of nature and feeds us with poetry. Not much of surprise, Dami posits in the first two lines with the grief that darkness, the ‘gloom’ of the night, has over the return of the day, regeneration: happiness. There is the reductive mechanism of the activities of these forces of nature put into drama:

Night said, “There is nothing more

                        Heartbreaking than watching a day break.”

 

“Home” is a projection of that nostalgic fraction, the magnetic memories of home throw us into distance, and you begin to hunger for it again. As ‘Ambition’ sends everybody across the other side of the river. Then, we have melange of definitions for home. Your home is not your home if you are not careful, where the presence of peace is lacking, and love and comfort absent themselves:

Sometimes home is a heartache

                        Unrepentant, in spite of geographical span.

“Lagos Bunnies” might have documented the poet’s experience. He might have fictionalised the Lagos experience of every first timer new to the city. And if one does not chart his/her way properly, you could be a “Johnny Just Drop”. As the last fragment of the poems, Dami makes the merger of Lagos experience and countenance, its handsomeness, ugliness, busy-ness, in “Lagos Bunnines” and slowly, Dami dances into sensuality again in “Slow Dancing” and registers for us what poetry means in “The Alphabet Laboratory”.

 

Olajide Micheal is a poet and regular contributor to LitCaf Supplement.

Daybreak

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So I published a  chapbookImage. Here is the press release: Saraba Magazine is pleased to flag off her individual poetry chapbook series with Daybreak & Other Poems by Dami Ajayi. This individual poetry chapbook series project is another rigorous attempt at showcasing Nigerian, and indeed, African poetry written by Nigerians and Africans residing within the country and continent.

Daybreak is a suite of fourteen poems described as “fine narratives laden with the beauty of verse.” With expansive themes ranging from dreams to memories, love to lust, longing to grief, these poems are deeply rooted in our contemporary world and exalt audacious truths that need to be addressed.

Dami  Ajayi is the Co-publisher/ Fiction Editor of Saraba Magazine. A medical doctor who moonlights as a writer, his poems have been anthologized to a worldwide audience. His acclaimed debut volume of poems, Clinical Blues, which has notoriously stayed out of print, was shortlisted for the inaugural Melita Hume Prize in manuscript form.  He lives in Lagos.

Guest Blog Post by Adebiyi Olusolape

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“At that time we used to go ahead of the caravan, and when we found a place suitable for pasturage we would graze our beasts. We went on doing this until one of our party was lost in the desert; after that I neither went ahead nor lagged behind. We passed a caravan on the way, and they told us that some of their party had become separated from them. We found one of them dead under a shrub, of the sort that grows on the sand, with his clothes on and a whip in his hand”—Ibn Battuta, Travels in Asia and Africa (1325-1354), translated and selected by H.A.R. Gibb

In relation to that quote, consider this quatrain:

“Before the caravans depart. This place punishes stragglers

Drunks, loners and madmen. It punishes drifters

With thirst and hunger and a painful death. Drivers

Setting out pray for strength and against shape-shifters.”—The Sahara Testaments, p.162

Consider, if you will, the word “Drivers,” be they the drivers of the chariots, caravans or jalopy trucks—chariots from c.1000 B.C., memories of which have been preserved in rock drawings of the Sahara; caravans of travelers and traders in the 14th century, details of which can be found in Riḥlah from that period; the jalopy trucks of the 21st century that have been taking those young West Africans who are in search of better lives in Europe across the desert, all those things we know from the stories of our hard-luck friends, neighbors and all those feature-length TV documentaries—plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The Sahara Testaments has been subject of discussion since the poet began to compose it about 3 years ago, as portions of it were published on Facebook (the earliest from November, 2010) and in literary magazines (this one from May, 2012), receiving comments and the like. One of the many ways in which the work has spoken to me is what I have shared to, briefly,  above.

The poet has been reading from the work at various public readings, one was the series of events in Cape Town, South Africa, organized around the celebration of Nadine Gordimer’s 88th birthday in November 2011. The latest of those public readings was the one at Patabah Bookshop, Surulere, Lagos, from last month, August 24 (pictures, video). There was a book signing at the end of that reading at Patabah Bookshop and not a few of those books were bought in the same store.

There is a Kindle version of the book on sale, and the readership has not been limited to a few cities in Nigeria. The blogger Aaron Bady who is based in Austin, US, tweeted on August 28, “Reading @tadepen’s ‘The Sahara Testaments.’ Feels good to read poetry again.” The Irish poet, Ian Duhig, who is based in Leeds, UK, tweeted on September 10, “In between reading Eliot books, I’m enjoying @tadepen Tade Ipadeola’s brilliant ‘The Sahara Testaments’, longlisted for the Nigeria Prize.”

In July, my search for a copy of the latest edition of Chimurenga magazine, Chronic, took me to the Glendora bookstore in Ikeja, Lagos. I saw copies of The Sahara Testaments on display there. Only last week, I was at Mosuro bookstore, Jericho, Ibadan, hunting for a copy of Okabou Ojobolo’s Ozidi Saga (ed. J.P. Clark). Of course, copies of The Sahara Testaments were available for purchase there as well.

Look, the most significant event in African letters, in this second decade of the 21st century, is probably the publication of The Sahara Testaments. The event is unfolding as we speak. The good news is that it isn’t too late to join in. If you are yet to own a copy of the book, electronic or paperback, or yet to join in the conversation, you know what they say, better late than never. And, I assure you, the conversations centering on The Sahara Testaments will continue, they will engage generations yet unborn. It is that kind of book.

Let me buttress that last claim: here’s an old favorite of mine, a story from the Arabian Nights, “The Fisherman and the Genie.” And, here’s a second short story, by Rabindranath Thakur, which I hope gives you as much pleasure as it always gives me.

It’s hard to miss the influence of the One Thousand and One Nights on “The Hungry Stones,” don’t you think? And, it goes deeper than that explicit, inter-textual reference to the Arabian Nights in “The Hungry Stones.”

Now, consider the quatrains below:

“They say the only illness of the desert

Is madness. A great truth, verity little known

As thin as that membrane of the heart

As difficult to cure once infected. On its own

 

Seeking not the company of men or beast

The desert mutters silent litanies of wrongs

Repressed joys, erased hopes that was yeast

Prospect that was aroma of victory songs

 

In solitude, honing bone-deep hatred

Growing colour-blind, spurning overtures of rain

Rewriting biographies of trees in whose stead

Gnarled revenants remain. The desert is diary of pain.”—The Sahara Testaments

If you have read those short stories or are already familiar with them, tell me, do these three stanzas put you in touch with the bitterness of that genie in “The Fisherman and the Genie,” after its first 400 years of imprisonment, especially that last stanza?

Do the three stanzas put you in mind of Thakur’s “The Hungry Stones,” especially that first stanza?

These three stanzas—which are section XXIII from chapter IV, “First Breath,” the first part of The Sahara Testaments, p.81—are for me the nexus of “The Fisherman and the Genie” and “The Hungry Stones.” Your children and mine will love the stories of the One Thousand and One Nights just as they will grow to appreciate the works of Rabindranath Thakur and Tade Ipadeola.